Anja Sautmann is a Senior Economist in the World Bank's Development Research Group (Poverty, Inequality and Human Development Team) and the point person for DECRG's AI and Digital Development (AI/DD) Research Initiative.

Anja is interested in how households and individuals make decisions and how individual behavior shapes optimal policy design.  She has a long-standing research program on patient demand for care and public healthcare provision, especially for children and mothers, in Mali and Nigeria.  She is also working on projects in healthcare and in the justice sector that harness machine learning techniques and AI for better development outcomes. Before joining the World Bank, Anja was an Assistant Professor at Brown University (2010-2017) and the Director of Research, Education, and Training at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT (2017-2020). She received her Ph.D. in Economics from New York University.