Professor Joseph Wong is vice-president (international) at the University of Toronto. He is also the Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School of Global Affairs, professor of political science, and he held the Canada Research Chair in Democratization, Health and Development for two full terms from 2006-2016.
Wong was the Director of the Asian Institute at the Munk School from 2005 to 2014. Professor Wong’s research focuses on the political economy of development, and he has published extensively in leading academic journals and several books with top academic university presses. Wong is currently leading a large-scale research project on the political economy of reach and redistribution in developing world settings, summarized in a 2017 TEDx talk.
Inspired by the United Nation’s SDGs, Professor Wong developed the Reach Alliance, a model for student-led, faculty-driven, multi-disciplinary research dedicated to investigating the pathways to success for innovative development programmes that reach the world’s most marginalised populations. He is a graduate of McGill University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
