Dr. Howard J. Shatz specializes in international economics and economics and national security. His RAND research has included economic issues related to Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine; economic competition and the U.S. role in the global economic order; great power competition in the Middle East; the Chinese and Russian economies; China-Israel relations; labor-market reform in Mongolia; the finances and management of the Islamic State and its predecessors; civil service reform, development policies, labor markets, and statistical systems in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq; and the development of socio-economic strategy by governments.

From 2007 to 2008, he was on leave from RAND, serving as a senior economist at the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisers.

Dr. Howard J. Shatz has written journal articles, book chapters, and policy reports on trade and labor markets, exchange rates and economic performance, the geography of international investment, services trade, and trade barriers and low-income countries.

Before joining RAND, he was a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, focusing on California and the global economy. Dr. Howard J. Shatz has held research fellowships at the Brookings Institution and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and has worked as a consultant to the World Bank and on advisory projects for Latin America, Africa, and South Asia countries. He holds a PhD. in public policy from Harvard University.

Professor Christopher Mark Davis has been an academic at Oxford University for 25 years and has held the post of Reader in Command and Transition Economies in the Department of Economics and School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies.

He became a Professorial Research Fellow at OIPA in October 2016.  His initial new research for OIPA is aimed to carry out an international comparison of the changing capabilities of cohorts of the elderly during 1990-2010 in seven countries that have experienced major wars and economic crises since 1930: China, Germany, Japan, Russia, South Korea, the UK and the USA.

Professor Christopher Mark Davis received his B.A. (Applied Mathematics) from Harvard College in 1969, served as an officer in the U.S. Navy from 1969 to 1973 and was a postgraduate student in the Economics Faculty of Cambridge University from 1973 to 1978. He wrote a doctoral thesis on The Economics of Health in the USSR (PhD in Economics 1980) that evaluated health issues empirically using a quantitative model linking the population, health sector and economy in the USSR, which was based on a methodology developed by his PhD. Supervisor, Professor Richard Stone (Nobel Prize 1984).

Professor Christopher Mark Davis was one of the first scholars in the world to analyse the problem of rising mortality in the USSR. From 1978 to 1991, Christopher was a Lecturer at the University of Birmingham.

Volodymyr Ponomarenko investigates the problems of strategic enterprise management, simulation modeling, reforming higher economic education, training competent specialists, and the use of information technologies in education. In the 1970s, he was one of the pioneers of simulation modeling in the USSR. He is author of about 400 scientific works, in particular, more than 100 monographs and about 50 training manuals. Under the scientific leadership of Volodymyr Ponomarenko, strategic programs for the development of the Kharkiv region until 2011, until 2015 and until 2020 were developed.

He is head of the scientific school "Development of strategic management systems of an industrial enterprise" of Simon Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics. His key publications include the following monographs: Problèmes de formation des économistes et managers compétents en Ukraine, Розвиток вищої освіти в Україні: аспекти менеджменту та маркетингу, Some problems of the education system in Ukraine: analytics, Conceptual and model support for the development of an innovative-active university.

Richard Griffith is a tenured Professor in the Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology Program and the Executive Director of The Institute for Culture, Collaboration, and Management at the Florida Institute of Technology, a partner in the Erasmus Mundus Work and Organizational Psychology consortium. Dr. Griffith also serves as the Culture Research Portfolio Manager. Dr. Griffith provides more than 20 years of expertise in talent management research and consulting. He is the author of over 150 publications, presentations, and book chapters and has conducted funded research for the Department of Defense examining the assessment and development of cross-cultural competence.

Dr. Griffith is the founder of the Ph.D. program at Florida Tech, including the international concentration, the first in the U.S. In addition, he is the editor of the books Internationalizing the Organizational Psychology Curriculum, Critical Issues in Cross Cultural Management, and Leading Global Teams. He has served as a guest editor of the journals Human Performance and Organizational Development and associate editor of the European Journal of Psychological Assessment. He has been recognized as a Fellow by the International Association of Applied Psychology (IAAP), the Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology (SIOP), and as a Senior Research Fellow by the Army Research Institute. His work has been featured in Time magazine and The Wall Street Journal.

Currently Dr. Griffith is conducting research on the development and validation of measures of cross-cultural competence, and research and development on a technological solution to optimize experiential learning called Guided Mindfulness.