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PhD in Sustainable Development Student Profiles
Mark Orrs
www.columbia.edu/~mso2108
Mark Orrs is a fourth-year student in the PhD program in Sustainable Development. His primary interest is African economic growth and development, with approaches from the perspectives of tropical agriculture and arid/semi-arid lands, gender and education, and child mortality.
He is co-author of two articles on HIV/AIDS stigma, which were published in major public health journals. At present, he is completing his master’s thesis on the effects of a sanitary towel distribution campaign on girls’ attendance, for which he traveled to Coast Province in Kenya last November to collect primary data.
In 2003, Mark earned a BS in Sociology from Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. After a year of teaching fifth grade in Camden, New Jersey, he studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science, from which he received a Diploma in Economics with Distinction before being accepted into the Sustainable Development program. Mark has traveled to East Africa multiple times, including in 2006 to film a documentary on street children in Nairobi. He has also worked at a home for HIV-positive AIDS orphans, socio-medical outreach projects into Nairobi’s slums, income generating activities for slum dwellers, and the Millennium Villages Project on multiple, varied initiatives.