 in American Studies from Newton College of the Sacred Heart of Boston College in 1967.Birdsall served for three years as Senior Associate and Director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with a focus on issues of globalization and inequality, as well as on the reform of the international financial institutions.In November 2001, Birdsall co-founded the Center for Global Development (CGD)—just two months after September 11 attacks on the United States—with C. Fred Bergsten and Edward W. Scott, Jr.