Sabina Alkire

In May 2020, Alkire was awarded the Boris Mints Institute Prize for Research of Strategic Policy Solutions to Global Challenges for her contribution to the understanding of the dynamics and implications of poverty. Alkire’s research interests include, multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis, welfare economics, the capability approach, and the measurement of freedoms and human development.

She served as the Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor in International Affairs at the Elliott School at The George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. from 2015 until 2016. She currently holds positions as the director of OPHI, associate professor at the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford, and is a distinguished research affiliate of the Kellogg Institute for International studies at the University of Notre Dame. Recently, as director of OPHI, Alkire has led research teams to aid with publications such as "The real wealth of nations", for the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report.

Sabina Alkire is the director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), an economic research centre within the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford, England, which was established in 2007. She is a fellow of the Human Development and Capability Association. She has worked with organizations such as the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, the United Nations Human Development Programme Human Development Report Office, the European Commission, and the UK's Department for International Development.

From 1999 to 2001, Alkire worked as the coordinator for Culture and Poverty Learning-Research Program, World Bank, and PREM. From 2001 to 2003, she moved on to working for the Commission on Human Security as a research writer. From 2003 to 2013 Alkire continued her career as a research associate at the Harvard Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University. During her time there she won the Thulin Scholar of Religion and Contemporary Culture award from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and was listed in Foreign Policy Magazine "100 global thinkers 2010".

Furthering her postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford, Alkire went on to receive a Master of Philosophy in Christian political ethics and a Master of Science in economics for development in 1994 and 1995, respectively. For her Master of Science thesis, "The Full or Minimally Decent Life: Empiricization of Sen’s Capabilities Approach in Poverty Measurement", she was awarded the George Webb Medley Graduate Prize by the university. Later, she gained her doctorate in economics from Magdalen College, University of Oxford in 1999. Her doctoral thesis, which demonstrated how the work of Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen could be coherently and practically put to use in poverty reduction activities, was later published as a monograph with the title Valuing Freedoms: Sen's Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction (2002).

Born in Göttingen, West Germany, she left to the United States of America as a baby when her father took up a role teaching chemical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Alkire studied at the same university, graduating in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts in sociology. Afterwards, Alkire moved to England and attended the University of Oxford, where she obtained a diploma of theology with a distinction in Islam in 1992.