Rhema Vaithianathan, Ph.D., is currently the Director of the Centre for Applied Research in Economics and an Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Auckland. Previously, she was a research fellow at Australian National University, an independent economic consultant and policy analyst at the New Zealand Treasury. She was a Harkness Fellow at Harvard and a Foreign Scholar at Hitotsubashi University in Japan. She has published widely in health economics, entrepreneurship and development economics. She was awarded an University of Auckland's Business School Research Excellence Award. She earned both her doctorate in economics and master's of commerce from the University of Auckland.