Alumni Profiles
Eric Engelman
MPIA '08
Eric Engelman is an economist for the Louis Berger Group, an international infrastructure contracting and consulting firm. On assignment in Kabul, Afghanistan, he engaged in two projects which have required him to utilize a wide range of IR/PS skills.
After helping USAID build more than $1 billion worth of roads in Afghanistan, USAID asked Eric's group to help put the institutions in place that are necessary to fund and execute maintenance of the national highway network. He completed a study tour of road sector institutions in four neighboring countries, and is now developing a plan to pass a national fuel levy that will channel funds toward a privatized road maintenance scheme.
Eric is also providing technical direction to two large socio-economic studies to evaluate the impact of critical highway links under construction in the Afghan provinces. Despite the extremely challenging survey environment, he notes that his IR/PS background has made him reluctant to compromise on data quality. As a result, Eric's group is improvising a sampling method that links satellite imagery and handheld global positioning technology to obtain pre-selected random samples—the first time, to his knowledge, this has been done in Afghanistan.
