Madeline Brancel

Madeline Brancel is a Senior Policy Manager at J‑PAL where she manages the global Education sector. In this role, she builds research and scale partnerships, oversees an investment portfolio of 100+ projects under the Learning for All Initiative, and works with governments, bilaterals, and other stakeholders to accelerate the scale‑up of evidence‑informed solutions in education.

Prior to joining J‑PAL in 2022, Madeline was a Senior Program Officer at World Education, where she spent six years advising on the design, implementation, and evaluation of education and livelihoods programs in Mozambique, Egypt, and Ghana. She was also a Teaching Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a graduate intern at the Center for Global Development, where she conducted research on donor investments in girls’ education.

Madeline holds an EdM in International Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a graduate certificate in Early Grade Reading in Developing Countries from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee with a BA in Global Security Studies and a Committee Interdisciplinary Major in Portuguese.

In her free time, you can find her enjoying the New England coastline as an avid, year‑round surfer.