Dr. Badri Narayanan Gopalakrishnan is an affiliate faculty member and senior economist with the School of Environmental and Forestry Sciences, University of Washington-Seattle. Furthermore, he co-founded Infinite Sum Modelling LLC, with offices in Canada, the USA, India, China, and Hong Kong, and presence worldwide. Before moving to Seattle, he served Purdue University’s Center for Global Trade Analysis for almost a decade and prior to that, he was a Fellow at ICRIER (Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations), New Delhi, India. His broad expertise lies in economic analysis for business strategy and public policy, employing a variety of quantitative models. Recently, apart from his 18+ years of applied economic research experience in the trade, energy/environment, and development issues, he has been working on several other issues such as business economics of new technologies, advising several start-ups in these sectors.
Several of his models capture global supply chain economics as well as linkages among countries and industries from a holistic, dynamic perspective. He is widely known for his pivotal role in developing GTAP (Global Trade Analysis Project) based models and datasets used by thousands of researchers across the world. These models employ theory-consistent, data-founded and realistic approaches, involving a combination of optimization, applied mathematics, simulation, and statistical regressions, to make futuristic predictions and forecasts. He has published five books, over 100 research papers in reputed journals, books, and other outlets. Apart from top scholarly journals including Nature and American Economic Review, for over 4600 times, his research has been cited in popular magazines such as The Economist and several news outlets. He has also contributed several OpEds to magazines, newspapers, and websites across the world.
He is the Co-Founder and Partner, Infinite Sum Modelling LLC. He is also a Senior Researcher, School of Environmental and Forestry Sciences, University of Washington-Seattle, and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow, ECIPE. He has consulted widely with The World Bank Group, The United Nations ESCWA, FAO, ILO, ICRIER, The Commonwealth Secretariat, and McKinsey. He has presented his work in invited seminars in several places including Harvard University, MIT, Tufts University, etc., in 30 countries across the world. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai, and BTech from PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, India.