We are proud to announce that Aram Grigorian (ISET class 2015) was accepted with full university funding to the prestigious Economics Ph.D. program at Duke University. Aram received generous admission offers from other top schools, such as Johns Hopkins and Ohio State, which he had to decline. He also had to decline (at least for the time being) the possibility of a professional career as a rock guitarist.

We continue to track the success of our graduates and would like to congratulate Ivane Pirveli from ISET class 2011 on his latest achievement. Currently serving as Deputy Head of the Gas Department at the Georgian National Energy and Water Supply Regulatory Commission (GNERC), Ivane had been recently offered a prestigious position of a Seconded National Expert on Georgian energy law with the Austria-based Energy Community Secretariat.

The recent resetting of Georgian-Iranian bilateral relations was in the focus of a seminar organized by ISET and the Austrian Institute for Caucasus Studies as part of the Vienna Forum for the Modernization of the Black Sea Region. Held on Tuesday, March 22nd, the seminar covered both historical and current – political and economic – aspects of cooperation between the two countries.

For two days ISET’s cafeteria turned into a festive Azerbaijani kitchen. The preparation process was led by the first-year students of the ISET MA program, Orkhan Suleymanli, and his assistant Nijat Guliyev.

Graph 1 shows the density of Georgian farmers’ revenues received from selling their produce, generated from the sample of 3,000 Georgian rural households. (For the motivation and methodology of our study, please refer to the article that was published here last week. It is also available online on the ISET Economist Blog: “Dumb Farmers Do Not Grow Big Potatoes”, by Florian Biermann and Ruediger Heining).