Meltem is a human development economist with  20+ years of experience in social policy design and evaluation. Her research and consultancy work focuses on poverty, inequality, and the distributional impact of social policies on households and on children in low-opportunity settings. She has extensive experience managing international development projects, conducting policy research and evaluations for a range of clients (UN agencies, IFIs, governments and NGOs) and providing capacity building to researchers and practitioners in developing countries. She has strong expertise in the management, design and implementation of quantitative and mixed methods research and evaluation projects in a range of developing countries, including Indonesia, Myanmar, South Africa, Madagascar, Nigeria, Tanzania, Mali, Egypt, Turkey, Albania, Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and St Lucia.    From 2004-2013, she worked as a consultant for the World Bank where part of her responsibilities included building microsimulation models using household-level data for carrying out the Poverty and Social Impact Analysis of World Bank-funded projects in countries of operation.  Since 2013, she has been the Director of Development Analytics and in this capacity, she has led research projects and evaluations for the World Bank, UNICEF, International Labour Organization (ILO), WFP, European Commission, and the French Development Agency (AfD). She has been a team leader on projects for UNICEF and the World Bank focusing on child poverty, access to and affordability of childcare services as well as social protection programmes that target households with children.

She holds a dual BA degree from Brown University in Economics and International Relations, a master’s degree in International Development (MPAID) from Harvard University and a doctoral degree in Economics from the University of Oxford.