Dr Kaufmann has had a long and distinguished career at the World Bank, where his many prominent roles included Chief of Mission in the Ukraine office in 1992-96 and Lead Economist of the Development Research Group. He has made important contributions to the field of governance and anti-corruption in several areas, including by conceptualising state capture as a novel form of corruption, and by developing the Worldwide Governance Indicators, one of the most widely respected used corruption measurement tools. He is also an expert in natural resource governance, and was co-founder, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Governance Institute from 2015 to 2020. Most recently, Dr Kaufmann has developed a new global index of state capture. Dr Kaufmann has a PhD in Economics from Harvard University.

Dr Kaufmann has engaged with the CSC faculty over many years, and in October 2024 visited Sussex to give a seminar to students on the MA Corruption & Governance. He is also a member of the advisory board of the GI ACE research project Building Resilience to State Capture on which Liz David-Barrett and Tom Shipley are working. As a Visiting Professor, he will engage with MA students on an annual basis, as well as participating regularly in the research activities of the Centre including with respect to the GI ACE programme.