Guilherme Lichand

Guilherme Lichand's research focuses on the sources of educational inequities in the global South and on solutions with the potential to overturn them. He is co-director at the Stanford Lemann Center and a faculty affiliate at the Stanford King Center on Global Development and at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood. He holds a PhD in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University. He was previously the UNICEF Professor of Child Well-being and Development at the University of Zurich. Lichand is also a co-founder of Brazilian EdTech Movva, a student success management system supporting vulnerable students graduate college. He was acknowledged by the Schwab Foundation as one of the top-10 Brazilian social entrepreneur in 2020 (post-Covid legacy) and by MIT Technology Review as a top under-35 Brazilian innovator in 2014. Lichand's research has been published in numerous scientific journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and Nature Human Behavior, and campaigns featuring his work won multiple awards, including two lions at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. 

Lichand was a 2024-25 joint Institute for Advancing Just Societies and Stanford Impact Labs Design Fellow. He collaborates with partners in Brazil to help collect the data necessary to identify baseline inequalities along those dimensions and track how they respond to different educational policies. Most governments allocate significant resources to mitigate educational inequalities without the quality data needed to target them effectively. School and student characteristics, such as location, socioeconomic status, race, gender and disabilities, hugely influence the extent to which different children in low-resource settings can access quality education.