Dr. Alicia Robb is a Senior Fellow with the Kauffman Foundation and the Principal Investigator on the Kauffman Firm Survey. She is also a Research Associate with the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a Visiting Scholar with both the Basque Institute for Competitiveness in San Sebastian, Spain and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Dr. Robb received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has previously worked with the Office of Economic Research in the Small Business Administration and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. A leading expert in small business financing in the U.S., she has participated in SME financing initiatives by the Organization for Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the G20 Working Group on SME financing. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, she is the co-author of Race and Entrepreneurial Success published by MIT Press and A Rising Tide: Financing Strategies for Women-Owned Businesses by Stanford University Press. She serves on the Board of the National Advisory Council for Minority Business Enterprise and is a guest contributor for venues such as Huffington Post and Forbes.
She is also the Founder of the Foundation for Sustainable Development (FSD), which she led for 12 years and then served on the board for another three years. FSD is a San Francisco based international development organization that partners with grassroots development organizations in 10 locations around Latin America, Africa, and India. (www.fsdinternational.org)