Jennifer Murtazashvili is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests broadly focus on questions of institutional design and state building.  Specifically, she explores the relationship between customary and formal state institutions in the state-building process, the political economy of development, sub-national and local governance, as well as electoral design and reconstruction in fragile states.

For the past 15 years, she has focused on these issues in the context of Central Asia and Afghanistan. She has lived on the ground in the region for more than seven of those years and has conducted extensive fieldwork at the village, provincial, and national levels.

In addition to her academic experience, she has extensive professional experience working for a wide array of government and development agencies including managing democracy and governance assistance for the USAID the mission in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and providing assistance to the newly elected Afghan Parliament for the United Nations Development Program. She also served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

Murtazashvili holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University as well as a M.A. in Agricultural and Applied Economics and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin—Madison.

 

Website: http://jen.murtazashvili.org/