About

Ray Offenheiser is a professor of the practice in the Keough School of Global Affairs, and Director of the McKenna Center for Human Development and Global Business. Previously Offenheiser served as Director of the Pulte Institute for Global Development from 2017 to 2023. His areas of expertise and research interests include poverty alleviation, inequality, human rights, US foreign policy, and international development. He spent more than two decades as a member of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies' advisory board.

Offenheiser served as president of Oxfam America for more than 20 years before coming to Notre Dame in 2017. During his tenure, the relief and development agency grew more than eightfold and increased its influence on issues of international development, human rights, and humanitarianism.

Before joining Oxfam America, he represented the Ford Foundation in Bangladesh and the Andean and Southern Cone regions of South America. He has directed, co-founded, or worked for a number of nonprofit groups.

He has served on advisory boards for the World Economic Forum, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Aspen Institute, the World Agricultural Forum, the Gates Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, Harvard Business School, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Cornell University.

Offenheiser graduated from Notre Dame in 1971 and holds an MA in development sociology from Cornell University.

KDR Assistant:
Makeda Gemechu