Christopher Paek

Christopher Paek is a senior qualitative researcher at AIR. He has more than nine years of academic and practitioner experience in the field of international development—primarily in the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) region—with a particular focus on microfinance, financial inclusion, formal/informal economy, institutional sociology, and critical political economy.

In his present position, Dr. Paek conducts qualitative research as part of International R&E’s mixed-methods approach to project evaluations. He has extensive training on rigorous qualitative methods including ethnography, grounded theory, human-centered design, social network analysis, and discourse analysis. Dr. Paek has conducted qualitative research and evaluation on several international projects including a study on student dropout and low enrollment rates in Tanzania, a water supply and distribution project in Zambia, and a nutrition and literacy project in Sri Lanka. He has also worked on several domestic projects in areas such as higher education and survey methodology.

Prior to his position with AIR, Dr. Paek served as a project management consultant with the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation (UNOSSC) where he helped manage and administer two international South-South development programs.