Laurence Simon

Laurence Simon is Professor of International Development and Director of the Center for Global Development and Sustainability. He was the Founding Director of the Graduate Programs in Sustainable International Development from 1993 to 2014 and served as the Associate Dean for Academic Planning at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management from 2003 until September 2009. Since 2018, he serves as the Joint Editor-in-Chief of CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion, an open access, peer-reviewed journal published under the auspices of the Brandeis Library.

Simon’s research and teaching center on critical issues of social exclusion and emancipatory development. His current research focuses on psychological and cultural barriers to social inclusion, poverty reduction, and on the role of social movements in development. In November 2024, Prof. Simon's interdisciplinary work on global and national development was honored by Woxsen University in Hyderabad, India by inaugurating the 'Laurence Simon Department of Economics'. In March 2025, Dr. Simon's leadership on critical caste studies and social justice was honored by the State Government of Telangana, India and the Eashwari Bai Memorial Trust, Hyderabad with the Eashwari Bai Memorial Award named for the Dalit woman whose life was dedicated for the upliftment of the "backward classes who were subjected to slavery and caste discrimination". Dr. Simon was the first foreigner to receive this honor.

In 2007, he took a leave from Brandeis to serve as the senior adviser on global poverty to the executive director of the Google Foundation and helped establish google.org's initial strategies and recruitment of senior staff. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Dr. Simon is an adviser on higher education curriculum development and governance. He served on the Working Group, appointed by the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, for the design of a new university in Sri Lanka.

In the late 1970s, Dr. Simon was a program director for Oxfam America and launched its work in Central America and the Caribbean. Later as Oxfam’s first director for policy analysis and advocacy, he helped usher in an era when major U.S. International NGOs looked critically at national and global aid and development policy. His research effort in 1981 on the negative impact of the U.S. financed El Salvador agrarian reform prompted a major investigation by The New York Times that resulted in Congressional hearings. Since then he has lectured widely in the United States, Europe and Asia on problems of landlessness and agrarian repression.

Dr. Simon founded the American Jewish World Service (AJWS) in 1984 and was its President until June 1989. During this time, he served on the executive committee of InterAction, the association of U.S. international development organizations.

During his AJWS years, and beyond, Dr. Simon collaborated with Israeli scientists Drs. Shlomo Navarro and Jonathan Donahaye, and the American disaster mitigation specialist, Frederick C. Cuny of Intertect, which resulted in sweeping innovation in the technology of emergency food relief and methods for on-farm and national grain storage. Simon directed the establishment and monitoring of UN World Food Programme field trials for elimination of losses of emergency grain en route to or in areas of famine. This work led to his founding of Grain Protection International, an NGO, for further R&D. Subsequently, Dr. Simon founded GrainPro Inc. which is today the leader in hermetic storage of durable grains and high value commodities eliminating chemical insecticides and the ozone-depleting fumigants mandated by the Montreal Protocol.

At the request of the Soros Foundation, the International Rescue Committee and Intertect, Dr. Simon worked on Sarajevo relief during the Serbian siege of the city assisting Fred Cuny to design and implement emergency winterization programs. Their major effort was the construction inside a road tunnel of a water treatment plant that provided the only potable water for the city during the war. His colleague, Fred Cuny was assassinated on another Soros mission two years later in Chechnya.

In 1990 and 1991, Dr. Simon served as the resident evaluation officer for a joint United Nations Development Programme / World Bank national poverty alleviation program in Sri Lanka. He has also been an adviser to the World Bank on land reform.

His early career was at the City University of New York where he taught in a transitional year SEEK program to raise the academic skills of students from disadvantaged and minority communities. He taught at Fordham University where he served as Assistant to the Dean and administered the Third World Institute where he began his long association with Gary MacEoin and the Brazilian social theorist Paulo Freire.

Laurence Simon earned his doctorate from the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University where he had previously received a Master's in International Development. His undergraduate degree was in philosophy at Queens College of the City University of New York. In 1997, the University of Judaism (now American Jewish University) conferred upon him the Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa. He also has studied philosophy and political theory at the New School for Social Research in New York under Horace Kallen, Hans Jonas, and Hannah Arendt.