Sudarno Sumarto is an economist and the founding Director of the SMERU Research Institute. He previously served as a Policy Adviser to the National Team for the Acceleration of Poverty Reduction (TNP2K) under the Office of the Vice President of Indonesia from 2010 to 2024, and was also a Visiting Fellow at the Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard University and the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) at Stanford University. His research focuses on poverty, social protection, labor, subsidies, and public policy, and his work has been published in leading journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Journal of Development Economics.