Valida Pantsulaia is an invited lecturer and BA thesis supervisor at ISET, and a chief economist at the National Bank of Georgia. She is also a short-term consultant at the World Bank. Valida received her MA in economics from ISET (2019, class valedictorian) and BA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania (2016). She also earned an online MicroMasters degree in Finance from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, 2021). Currently, she is a PhD student in economics at Caucasus University.

Valida is actively involved in research and is passionate about topics like macrofinancial risks, healthcare economics, and climate-related financial risk modeling. As part of her undergraduate studies, she spent three months in rural Guatemala, exploring healthcare seeking behavior among the local population. Her recent work includes the analysis of Georgia’s shadow banking system, the negative externalities of financial dollarization, assessment of external vulnerability indicators, and evaluation of Georgia’s Universal Healthcare program.