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.

Yuchen Guo

Yuchen “Mo” Guo is a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Growth Lab for the academic year 2024/2025 and a PhD candidate in economics at LMU Munich and ifo Institute. His research focuses on structural change, technology and the labor market, using both aggregate and micro data. During his time at the Growth Lab, he will explore the application of network approaches to questions related to inequalities in the labor market and how economies and individuals adapt to changing labor markets in the face of technological change.

Antoine Cornevin

Antoine is a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Growth Lab for the 2024/2025 academic year and a Ph.D. candidate in International Economics at the Geneva Graduate Institute.

His research focuses on international macroeconomics and finance, and international trade. At the Growth Lab, Antoine explores how the structure of countries’ import and export bases —such as the concentration of trading partners and the elasticity of traded products—affects how market participants form economic expectations during global geopolitical events.”

David Torun

David is a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Growth Lab for the 2024/2025 academic year. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of St.Gallen and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego, funded by an SNSF Postdoc.Mobility fellowship.

His research focuses on international trade and international economics, particularly the stability of trade relations, the propagation of shocks through transportation networks, and the role of history in shaping trade patterns.

During his time at the Growth Lab, he will explore how global trade disruptions – such as protectionist measures and geopolitical conflicts – affect the formation and stability of trade relationships and production networks.

By modeling the role of critical suppliers in global value chains, he aims to provide tools for predicting how countries should respond to trade disruptions.

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.

Gonzalo Arana

Gonzalo joined Harvard’s Growth Lab as a Visiting Fellow in 2024. Before that, he completed the mid-career Master in Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to joining Harvard, Gonzalo was an associate partner at Oliver Wyman, where he led the Public Sector department in Spain and Portugal. Over the past ten years, he has advised companies and institutions in Greece, Italy, Germany, the UK, South Africa, Portugal, and Spain. In 2021, he joined the Spanish Chamber of Commerce to launch strategic projects for the private sector and was part of an expert group that included Spanish Public Administrations to develop strategies to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19.

Since 2016, Gonzalo has been the founder and chair of Proyecto Capicua, a small NGO dedicated to assisting underprivileged children in the suburbs of Madrid, focusing on facilitating their access to education. Gonzalo holds an MBA from INSEAD Business School, an MSc in Economics from the University of Navarra-IESE, and a BA in Management. He is also an Aspen Institute Spain Fellow. His research interests at the Growth Lab include growth diagnostics, green growth, and innovation policy.  He complements this fellowship with his position leading the Public Sector practice at Oliver Wyman in Spain and Portugal.

Publications

Alexandre de Queiroz Stein

Alexandre joined the Growth Lab as a Visiting Fellow in 2024. He holds a Master Degree in Economics and he is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the Center for Development and Regional Planning at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (CEDEPLAR/UFMG), Brazil.

 

His research is in the field of urban and regional development and quantitative methods, focused on the economic complexity approach. His ongoing PhD thesis is about economic complexity at the intra-urban level, specifically on spatial distribution patterns underlying productive diversification in large Brazilian cities. He is also a member of the Research Groups on Public Policy and Development (GPPD/UFMG) and the Research Group on Regional Economic Resilience (RESILIRE). He has experience in research and consulting projects on topics such as regional development and productive diversification. Currently, he also serves as the manager of the data analytics team at DataViva—a data visualization platform with a specific focus on the economic complexity approach for Brazil.

Diego Martin

Diego joined the Growth Lab at Harvard’s Center for International Development as a part-time researcher in 2023. Before joining the Growth Lab, Diego graduated with a Ph.D. in Economics at Purdue University. In his thesis, he studied the impact of providing information to women to increase female labor participation.

He received his BA and MA degrees in Economics from Universidad del Rosario, Colombia. Diego has worked as a consultant at the World Bank, the IOM -International Organization of Migration, and Princeton University. He has also worked for three years at CAF-Latin American Bank in Colombia and Argentina. His research interests include development economics, migration, labor markets, and impact evaluation of policies.