The government has decided to appoint Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya, executive director of the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), as the next ambassador and permanent representative of Bangladesh to the UN offices in Geneva, said an official announcement.
Born in 1956, Debapriya studied at St Gregory's High school in Dhaka and at Dhaka College. He did his MSc (economics) with distinction and PhD (economics) from the Plekhanov Institute of National Economy, Moscow.
He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford.
Prior to joining the CPD, Debapriya worked as a senior research fellow at Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS).
Debapriya was a senior Fulbright fellow at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), Washington D C in 2004-05. He was also a visiting fellow at the United Nations University-Institute of New Technology (UNU-INTECH), Maastricht, and Department of Economics, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.
He has conducted joint research with the Institute of Developing Economics (IDE), Tokyo, and the Institute of Development Planning and Management (IDPM), Manchester.
Debapriya undertook assignments for a number of international organisations, including the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, UNDP, UNEP, UNIDO, UNCTAD, ILO as well as bilateral development agencies from the USA, Japan, UK, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Sweden.
He has more than one hundred publications to his credit, including chapters in books, monographs, journals, articles and research reports.