Development and Policies Research Center (DEPOCEN)
For his Luce year in Vietnam, Rob Rogers will work in Hanoi to support the work and programs of the Development and Policies Research Center (DEPOCEN). Established in 2005 as an independent research organization, DEPOCEN has gained its reputation for its wide-ranging coverage of socioeconomic issues, including poverty analysis, macroeconomic policies, business and investment environment, market research, trade liberalization, governance, gender equality, program monitoring and impact evaluation.
Rob received a master’s degree in Globalization and Public Decision Strategy at Sciences Po Aix, the French institute of political science in Aix-en-Provence in Spring 2016. As the elected cohort delegate, he organized academic and social events and facilitated communication with the school administration. To fund his studies in France, he worked part-time as a bartender, an English teacher with the Acadomia Institute, and as a freelance French-to-English translator. In 2014, Rob graduated Phi Beta Kappa with honors from the University of Michigan with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy. He was the president of the school’s philosophy club, and volunteered regularly at the World Medical Relief and The Freedom House in Detroit. He worked for three summers in Ann Arbor as a research assistant and project leader with the University of Michigan Health System, where he studied Project Healthy Schools, an educational intervention aimed at reducing childhood obesity in Detroit schoolchildren. He has presented the research findings in peer-reviewed publications and at national public health conferences.
Rob remains passionate about the alleviation of global health and educational disparities. This spring, he completed his master’s degree with an internship at the UNESCO office in Dakar, Senegal, where he analyzed the effects of an HIV education program in West Africa. In the long term, Rob hopes to apply his academic and professional experiences to a career at the intersection of public health and education policy. In his free time, he enjoys travel, snowboarding, studying languages, and craft beer.