Dr. Jonathan Andreas, assistant professor of economics at Bluffton University, will present "A History of Global Poverty" at Bluffton's Civic Engagement Forum, at 11 a.m. Tuesday, April 5, in Founders Hall.

Free and open to the public, the forum is part of the university's 2010-11 focus on the civic engagement theme of "Living with Enough: Responding to Global Poverty."

Andreas, who earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois-Chicago, holds a bachelor's degree in American studies from Grinnell College in Iowa.

After graduation, he worked, volunteered and bicycled for three years in Asia and Latin America, where he became interested in economics and, more specifically, in the question of why some people were rich and some were poor. After returning to America, he was the materials manager for three seasons at a welfare-to-work, urban gardening project in Chicago.

"I grew up on a farm and I loved gardening, so I thought it would be fun and meaningful work," he recalls.

"It was meaningful, but it was also overwhelming because the problems of urban poverty are a lot more entrenched than what the Good Samaritan dealt with." He went on to earn his master's degree in economics, also from Illinois-Chicago, before coming to Bluffton in 2007.