Congratulations to Kate Vyborny, CGD's First Rhodes Scholar

Here at CGD we are thrilled to announce that our friend and colleague Kate Vyborny has been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, the highly prestigious international award for study at the University of Oxford. I believe it is a CGD first. We have always had the absolutely best, smartest, and most committed and passionate junior staff, without which there is no way CGD that would be the influential institution that it is today. So this is a thrill but not a surprise.Kate joined CGD as my special assistant in August 2006. She conquered that job quickly, so I couldn't disagree with the logic of her becoming a program coordinator, a job in which she is now deploying an even wider range of her extraordinary skills -- as an entrepreneur, an intellectual, a diplomat and an analyst. Kate now works with me on two major initiatives: Progress-Based Aid for Education and new work on measuring the "quality of aid." The second is an ambitious effort to design a data-intensive quasi-index that will rank the 15 largest country donors, and separately the 20 or so largest bilateral and multilateral aid agencies, on various measures of aid quality, as distinct from quantity. We hope among other things that this will create an agenda for development advocates to lobby for not just more but better aid.The Thanksgiving holiday we will shortly celebrate here in the U.S. is a good time for all the members of the CGD community to count our blessings in having so many wonderful young colleagues like Kate who are bringing their commitment and talents to improving lives in the developing world.