Bethany Park
Bethany Park is Global Managing Director of Policy, Advisory, and Strategy at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), where she leads efforts to bridge the gap between research evidence and action at scale. With over a decade of experience in international development, her work focuses on translating rigorous evidence into scaled interventions and systems change through strategic partnerships with governments, NGOs, and funders across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Park oversees IPA’s global network of embedded evidence labs: policy units housed within government agencies that institutionalize data-driven decision-making from ministerial levels to local implementation. She also leads IPA’s Right Fit Evidence unit, which builds monitoring, evaluation, and learning expertise among implementing organizations and funders to strengthen evidence-informed programming. Her current priorities include advancing AI-enabled approaches to evidence-based policymaking and strengthening partner capacity for adaptive, learning-oriented program management.
She holds an M.A. in Politics from Princeton University, where she was a Lassen Fellow focusing on Latin American politics and development, and a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University’s Walsh School, where she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.
Park’s research and thought leadership has appeared in academic journals and practitioner outlets including Political Analysis, Journal of Development Effectiveness, and Stanford Social Innovation Review. She is fluent in Spanish and has conducted fieldwork across Latin America, Africa, and South Asia.
