Areas of Interest: Information and communication technologies (ICTs), media and international development; social entrepreneurship; Latin American baseball.
Geoffrey Kirkman is deputy director and a Watson fellow at the Watson Institute. He also teaches an undergraduate course on social entrepreneurship as a lecturer at Brown's School of Engineering.
He was previously managing director of the International Technologies Group at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Among his other writing, Kirkman was the managing editor, with co-editors Jeffrey Sachs, Klaus Schwab and Peter Cornelius, of the Global Information Technology Report 2001-2002: Readiness for the Networked World, published jointly by Harvard University and the World Economic Forum. From 1998 to 2002, he was the founder and managing director of the Information Technologies Group at Harvard's Center for International Development. He has been a Visiting Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab, a consultant to the UNDP Human Development Report and a contributor to the United Nations ICT Task Force. He is president and founder of the not-for-profit Sports for Development Foundation, which works with professional Latin American baseball players to harness their fame and goodwill for social and economic development in their countries of origin. He was an executive producer of The Republic of Baseball: Dominican Giants of the American Game, a documentary film about the first generation of Dominican baseball players in the major leagues. Kirkman is also a fellow emeritus at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School.
Kirkman has professional experience in more than 30 countries worldwide, with a particular emphasis on Latin America. He previously also worked for the World Bank in Mexico City and Washington, D.C., and the United States Information Agency in Spain. He received his MPP from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and his AB, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, in international relations and Hispanic studies from Brown University.