Soazic Elise Wang Sonne is a PhD research fellow in economics and governance from the United Nations University (UNU-MERIT) in the Netherlands. She is currently an economist with the Health, Nutrition and Population Global Practice of the World Bank Group in Washington DC supporting projects aiming at strengthening health systems and health financing in Fragile and Conflict Affected countries (Republic of Congo, CAR, Chad, Burundi, Ghana, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya) for a better response to the COVID-19 pandemic. She joined the World Bank Group in September 2019 through the Young Professional (YP) and was previously a 2018 UK-DFID/ World Bank fellow working on analytical research projects on forced displacement in Tanzania and Burundi.

 

She holds a double engineering degree in Statistics, Econometrics and Applied Economics and a MSc in Program Evaluation from the CAPESA/ ISSEA/ ENSAE Paris funded by the Cameroonian Government and the Cameroon Women UK Chevening scholarship (CAMCHEV). Her research interests are on the intersection of applied development impact evaluation in conflict and post-conflict affected countries using quantitative data. She is an affiliate and alumni of the Project TIER aiming at Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research and was a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS). In 2019 she was a trinity-term fellow at the University of Oxford Department of International Development and a German DAAD scholar at the Max Planck Institute in Rostock, Germany where she worked on digital computational methods using twitter data to proxy migration. She was also a GDN-EIB research fellow with the Global Development research Network and received the 2020 Imperial College London Women Scholarship Award. She is a recipient of a research grant for the Council of Social Sciences Research in Africa (CODESRIA) to promote research transparency and openness in higher education in Africa. She is a strong advocate of research transparency and reproducibility in the Social Sciences and her work as a catalyst, training closer to 1000 researchers across the US, Europe, and Africa on transparency and reproducibility methods has beenrewarded by the 2017 UC Berkeley-BITSS Leamer-Rosenthal Prize. In her sparetime, Elise is mentoring young girls to raise their awareness and interest in STEM careers (Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Maths) through the BMGA fellowship mentoring program and the New York Academy of Sciences 1000 Girls, 1000 futures global STEM Alliance program. Elise is a 2021-2022 1 Millions girls/UNESCO STEM ambassador and was a 2021 World Bank Youth Summit case challenge mentor.