2017 Leamer-Rosenthal Prize Recipient — Emerging Researcher

Soazic Elise Wang Sonne is a statistician and economist researcher (PhD fellow) at the United Nations University (UNU-MERIT) and an Economist (Young Professional) at the Social Development Unit of the World Bank Group in Washington DC. Since early 2015, Soazic has been spearheading the research transparency movement across Sub Saharan Africa (Cameroon, Niger, South Africa, Kenya), Europe (Netherlands, UK) and the United States. As a Catalyst, Soazic has managed to train nearly 1000 researchers in Cameroon, South Africa, the UK, the Netherlands, and the US on research transparency and reproducibility techniques.

Her research focuses on the application of micro-econometric impact evaluation techniques to understand which interventions work better to increase women’s empowerment, labor-saving technology adoption, and children’s health and schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa. Through her teaching activities in statistics and econometrics, as well as her thesis mentorship of MSc students in Public Policy and Human Development at her university, Elise aims to advance the rigor of research methods. She is dedicated to “Empowering the next generation to advance Open education, Open Access and Open Data”, and is committed to sensitizing and building junior researchers’ adoption of transparent methods in Sub Saharan Africa. Elise is a 2021-2022 1 Millions girls/UNESCO STEM ambassador and was a 2021 World Bank Youth Summit case challenge mentor.

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