Islam Al Faid

Research Associate

Islam Al Faid leads ground-level execution of projects at ARCED Foundation, translating study designs from top universities and major funders into rigorous field evidence. As a research associate, he directs teams across the full research pipeline, from study design and enumerator training through large-scale data collection, cleaning, and analysis. His work spans randomized controlled trials, impact evaluations, and large household surveys, anchoring ARCED's partnerships with the USAID, IFPRI, J-PAL's King Climate Action Initiative, the Government of Bangladesh's Department of Environment, and leading academic economists, including collaborators at the National University of Singapore.

He has led a large-scale environmental randomized controlled trial evaluating a regulatory intervention to reduce air pollution from brick kilns, managing it through its midline, follow-up, and endline rounds. The study combined nationwide field surveys with satellite and administrative data, and involved direct engagement with the Department of Environment, ministry officials, and departmental directors nationwide, alongside kiln owners and managers in the field. He has also delivered CDSP-IV, a large household survey and impact evaluation carried out with IFPRI and IFAD. Across these projects he builds fully reproducible analytical pipelines in Stata, supported by R and Python, and produces publication-ready outputs in LaTeX, while instrumenting field data through SurveyCTO, Survey Solutions, and ODK.

He earned his honours and master's degrees in health economics from the University of Dhaka, with coursework concentrated in economics, ranking among the top three in his cohort in both. He previously served as Research Assistant to Dr. Hossain Zillur Rahman, Chairperson of BRAC, at PPRC, and earlier contributed to a discrete choice experiment and a tobacco tax elasticity study during an internship at icddr,b. He commands both the methodology of rigorous research, from RCT and impact evaluation design to household survey methods, and the field and institutional relationships that carry complex studies from design to completion.