Gina Yannitell Reinhardt

Associate Professor Yannitell Reinhardt’s work examines how decision-making under uncertainty affects the distribution of wealth in society. She focuses her work on the political economy of foreign aid, economic and social development, and the political and policy implications of disasters. This pursuit has drawn her inquiry in fascinating directions. Gina has studied race, trust, and migration; the construction of trust by the media across levels of government; and how the allocation of foreign aid conditions its performance effectiveness. Her current projects explore resilience-building strategies to avert, alleviate, manage, and mitigate disasters, and child trafficking surrounding disasters in Nepal.

Gina is also interested in how local authorities and other organisations evaluate the impact of their policies and programs and how they can improve their methods. As Leader of the University of Essex's ImpacTeam in the Department of Government, she has been developing an online toolkit to help local authority partners build capacity in evaluation methods.

Gina founded the Disaster and Emergency Research Network (DERN) and the Global South Academic Network (GSAN) to share research around disasters and the global south, and to build capacity in the academic community. Check out both today at: https://dern.essex.ac.uk and https://gsan.essex.ac.uk.