Ruth E. Levine, Ph.D., is Vice President and Chief Learning Officer at The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. She is a development economist with more than three decades of experience working on the design and implementation of policies and programs related to global health and education, social protection, gender equality, and labor markets. An expert on the use of data and evidence for decision-making, Ruth was most recently a policy fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Between 2011 and 2019, Ruth led the Global Development and Population Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, overseeing a total of approximately $1 billion in philanthropic grantmaking. From 2020-2023 she served as CEO at IDinsight,leading a research organization supporting government and NGO leaders in Asia and Africa. Previously, she was a deputy assistant administrator in the Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where she led the development of the agency’s evaluation policy and co-led an initiative to streamline performance measurement.
Ruth spent nearly a decade at the Center for Global Development, as a senior fellow and vice president for programs and operations. She also designed and evaluated health and education projects at the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank. She holds a doctoral degree jointly in economics and demography from Johns Hopkins University, and a B.S. from Cornell University.
