Aurélien Saussay

Aurélien Saussay is a Growth Lab Visiting Fellow, an Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics in the Grantham Research Institute and the co-founder and co-Director of the LSE Green Skills Lab. He is also an LSE’s Center for Economic Performance Associate, a member of the French Council of Economic Advisers (CAE), a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2022-2025) and he has been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School in the Fall semesters 2024 and 2025.

His research lies at the intersection of environmental, labour and macroeconomics. His main agenda focuses on the employment impacts of decarbonization, leveraging large-scale online job vacancy datasets and modern NLP techniques in particular. His secondary research stream assesses the macroeconomic impacts of climate change mitigation policies.

He was previously an economist at OFCE, Sciences Po, where he led the environmental economics team. He remains one of the main co-authors of the Multi-sector Macroeconomic Model for the Evaluation of Environmental and Energy policies (ThreeME), which contributes to the IPCC AR7 National Scenarios database and is used extensively in France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Mexico, Indonesia and Tunisia.

Jhon Fonseca

Jhon Fonseca is a Research Fellow at the Growth Lab at Harvard Kennedy School, where his research focuses on structural transformation, trade margins, and the evolution of productive ecosystems. He brings more than two decades of combined experience as a policymaker, consultant, and entrepreneur at the intersection of international trade, economic diversification, and innovation.

As Vice Minister of Foreign Trade of Costa Rica (2014–2018), he oversaw national trade and investment policy, led the country’s participation in regional integration forums, and served as chief negotiator of several free trade agreements. He has also consulted for the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and European Union on trade facilitation and competitiveness. In the private sector, he co-founded initiatives to develop technology and innovation ecosystems, linking entrepreneurship with sustainable development.

Fonseca is a PhD candidate in Economic History at the University of Barcelona, where his work examines the long-run dynamics of Costa Rica’s trade structure. He also teaches at the University of Costa Rica and continues to advise governments and businesses on strategy, trade, and innovation.

Yaniv Azani

During his fellowship at the Growth Lab,  Yaniv plans to leverage his extensive background in AI and machine learning to advance the “Atlas of Economic Complexity” project and contribute to the lab’s mission of understanding economic transformation. Drawing on his experience in technology development, international collaboration, and predictive modeling, he aims to enhance analytical capabilities to the current data the Growth Lab has collected by applying AI algorithms to large trade datasets, developing predictive models for growth and emerging industries (Like mapping the green industry supply chain to these patterns), predication of causal relationships between regions and leading industries/products, strengthen the technological infrastructure of the Atlas tool, and facilitate cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer. By integrating the power of machine learning models with rigorous research methodologies, seeking to deliver actionable new insights and enhance the decision support tools of the Atlas to catalyze shifting and collaboration across fields and industries for each region/Country.

Pierre-Alexandre Balland

Pierre-Alexandre Balland is a Visiting Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Growth Lab. He works with the academic team to advance fundamental research on economic complexity and its applications to technological change, industrial policy, green growth, and the future of work. Pierre-Alex currently serves as the Chief Data Scientist of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels, where he leads a team that leverages artificial intelligence and data science tools to address a wide range of public policy challenges. He is also a research fellow at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute and he is starting a third term in ESIR, the high-level expert group that advises the European Commission on research and innovation policy. He is originally from the South of France and previously held positions at Utrecht University, MIT, and UCLA.

Christian Chacua

Christian joined the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab as a Visiting Fellow in September 2019, and re-joined as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2022 after completing his Ph.D. in Economics of Innovation at the University of Bordeaux (France). His fields of interest cover economic complexity, economics of innovation and high-skilled migration. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in economics from the Universidad del Valle (Colombia) and a Master’s degree in economics of innovation from the University of Bordeaux. Before joining the CID, he has been both an intern and a contractor at the Economics and Statistics division of the World Intellectual Property Organization (Switzerland). 

Current Research/Projects

• High-skilled migration and knowledge diffusion
• Ethnic-cultural proximity and teamwork formation
• Migration, complexity, and regional inequality

Areas of Expertise

• Economics of Innovation
• Knowledge Diffusion
• High-skilled Migration
• Economics of patents

Ljubica Nedelkoska

Ljubica Nedelkoska joined the Growth Lab as a Visiting Scholar in 2012 and as a Research Fellow in 2013. She is also a resident Scientist at the Complexity Science Hub and a Visiting Professor at the Central European University, both located in Vienna, Austria.

Before joining Harvard, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher and a coordinator of the Economics of Innovation Research Group in Jena, and as a research fellow at the Zeppelin University, both in Germany.

Her research area is empirical labor economics, with focus on human capital, human mobility, migration and diasporas, and skill-technology relations. By studying these topics, she aims to understand how economies change their skill portfolios through the processes of on-the-job learning, interacting with technologies, and formal education and training; and how these changes transform the countries’ levels of productivity and development. She is also interested in economic policy and has participated in several economic policy projects in Albania, Sri Lanka, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden.

She holds a PhD in Economics of Innovation from the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany and a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from the Appalachian State University, North Carolina.

Muhammed A. Yildirim

Muhammed A. Yildirim serves as the Director of Academic Research at the Harvard Growth Lab and an Associate Professor of Economics at Koç University. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University and a BS degree from the California Institute of Technology. Prior to joining the faculty at Koç University, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Development at Harvard University.

His research primarily focuses on understanding network and spillover effects across various research domains, including industrial policy, international trade, productivity, economic growth, and matching. His work has been published in prestigious economic journals, including Science, Nature, Cell, Nature Communications, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Methods, Economic Policy, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Economic Theory, Theoretical Economics, and Research Policy. Furthermore, he is a co-author of “The Atlas of Economic Complexity,” published by the MIT Press.

Dr. Yildirim’s research has garnered significant attention from global media outlets, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BBC, CNN, and the New Yorker magazine. In recognition of his contributions, Dr. Yildirim received the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship in 2015, the Young Scientist Award (BAGEP) from the Science Academy in Turkey in 2021, and Koç University’s College of Administrative Sciences and Economics Outstanding Faculty Award in 2021.

Dany Bahar

Dany Bahar rejoined Harvard’s Growth Lab as a Senior Research Fellow in 2022. He was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow from 2010 – 2014, and an Associate from 2014-2021. 

He’s also an Associate Professor of Practice of International and Public Affairs at Brown University’s Watson Institute, and a Faculty Affiliate of Brown University’s Economics Department. An Israeli and Venezuelan economist, he also is affiliated to the Brookings Institution, the Center for Global Development, CESifo Group Munich and IZA Institute of Labor Economics.

His research sits at the intersection of international economics and economic development. In particular, his academic research focuses on structural transformation and productivity dynamics, and how are these affected by factors such as migration, innovation, trade, investment, entrepreneurship and the diffusion of technology within and across borders. His expertise on policy issues includes international trade, migration and globalization more generally, as well as the understanding of economic trends in the global economy and in particular regions. His academic work has been published in top economic journals and he often contributes to leading media outlets in the United States and around the globe.

He has worked and consulted for multilateral development organizations, such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Bahar holds a B.A. in systems engineering from Universidad Metropolitana (Caracas, Venezuela), a M.A. in economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a M.P.A. in international development from Harvard Kennedy School and a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University.

Matté Hartog

Matte Hartog joined the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab as a Research Fellow in 2015. He served as a Visiting Fellow in 2014. 

His research focuses on the role of knowledge diffusion through external sources in fostering structural change of economies. For new economic activities to develop in countries, cities and firms, an influx of new capabilities is often necessary, which can be obtained through the inflow of organizations (for instance, multinational companies) and people from elsewhere. Matte particularly focuses on economic development in Colombia and Mexico.

He graduated from the London School of Economics with a Master degree in Local Economic Development and from Utrecht University with a Master degree in Human Geography and Planning, and conducted PhD research on economic development in Colombia, Finland, The Netherlands and Sweden. 

For more information, please see his Harvard Scholar page