Dr. Karen Austrian is a globally recognized expert in adolescent girls health and wellbeing who leads the Population Council’s Girl Innovation, Research, and Learning (GIRL) Center – a global research hub that generates, synthesizes, and translates evidence on adolescents to support investments that transform their lives, especially for girls. She has developed, implemented, and evaluated multi-sectoral programs that build girls’ protective assets, such as financial literacy, social safety nets and access to education. Dr. Austrian has led several large scale, ground breaking research studies to understand what girls programs work, for which girls and why and she is also actively involved in ensuring that evidence on adolescents is synthesized and used by global, national and local stakeholders. Before joining Population Council in 2007, she co-founded and directed the Binti Pamoja Center, a program for adolescent girls in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. Dr. Austrian has lived in Nairobi, Kenya for over 20 years and has three kids, including two adolescent girls of her own.
