Sehar Noor

Sehar Noor was a Research Assistant at the Center for International Development at Harvard University from 2016 to 2019. In this position, she has worked on research projects on economic growth and diversification in Sri Lanka and Saudi Arabia. Sehar works on topics ranging from labor market dynamics and growth diagnostics to trade and foreign direct investment. She has experience analyzing large-scale data and literature to study economic trends and inform policy design.

Sehar also has experience working on youth employability and workforce development in rural communities with the Aga Khan Rural Support Program in Pakistan. Before that, she worked with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Pakistan. She graduated from Rollins College in 2016 with a Bachelor’s in International Affairs and Economics.

Mali Akmanalp

Mali is a former software engineer for CID who led backend development of the Atlas. He believes code is as much craft as engineering, and that like any craft, it can be honed with practice. He’s a big believer in the open source philosophy. Before working at CID, he’s been at a variety of organizations from Kayak.com to Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology. When he’s not deep in code or lurking on Hacker News, he enjoys reading, writing, noodling on the guitar, running and hiking.

Andres Gomez

Andres joined the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2014.

He is currently investigating the mechanisms that explain the economic differences between cities in terms of their internal occupational and industrial mix. He is also helping with the development of atlases of economic complexity for Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

Since his doctoral studies, he has been part of the Cities, Scaling and Sustainability research group at the Santa Fe Institute. There, he has been investigating the statistical properties of urban aggregate output to extract information about how cities coordinate heterogeneous and interdependent individuals in large scale production processes.

He holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Arizona State University, a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering and a B.S. in Physics, both from La Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia.

Media

• Recipes for Thriving Cities, Harvard Magazine
• Study: Why some mass killings and school shootings seem to be contagious, Washington Post

Miguel Angel Santos

Miguel Angel Santos joined the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2021 as Visiting Professor in Practice and Director of the Growth Co-Lab, a joint LSE-Harvard venture aimed at bringing together the capacities, expertise, and reach of two top academic institutions to expand the activities of the Harvard Growth Lab globally.

Miguel was previously Director of Applied Research at the Harvard Growth Lab, where he led teams in policy engagements aimed at developing top notch research to help governments rethink their growth and development strategies. In his eight years at the Harvard Growth Lab, Miguel was directly involved in projects at the national level in Mexico, Peru, Panama, Venezuela, Jordan, Albania, and Namibia; at the state level in Loreto (Peru) and Chiapas (Mexico); and at the city level in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Hermosillo (Mexico). He also performed as Adjunct Lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and as a Visiting Lecturer at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, teaching courses in Empirical Methods, Development Economics, Economic Growth and Development, and Policy Development Strategy to graduate students in public policy and public administration over the same period.

Before joining the field of development economics, Miguel held executive roles in corporate finance and business development in Latin America for a decade, performing as Director of Finance for the Cisneros Group of Companies (1997-2003), Head of Corporate Finance for Mercantil Servicios Financieros (2005-2007), and Business Vice-President for Sony Pictures and Entertainment Latin America (2008-2009).

He holds two Master of Science degrees in International Finance and Trade (2011) and Economics (2012) from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, a Master in Public Administration from Harvard University (2014), and a Ph.D. in Economics at Universidad de Barcelona (2016).

Op-eds

• Impact of the 2017 Sactions on Venezuela: Revisiting the Evidence, Brookings Institution, May 2019
• How did Venezuela’s Exchange Control Wound Global Companies?, Vox LACEA, July 2018
• El Paquete de Marudo no logrará ni estabilizar la miseria, The New York Times, September 2018
• ¿Llevará la hiperinflación a la transición democrática en Venezuela? The New York Times, January 2018

Neave O’Clery

Originally from Dublin, Neave O’Clery is a Fulbright Scholar and former Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Development at Harvard University where she worked in the field of complexity/network theory and economic development. Neave received her PhD in Mathematics from Imperial College London, and was previously an MSc student at Lincoln College, Oxford. She undertook her undergraduate studies at University College Dublin, which included a year at Ecole Polytechnique, Lausanne. Neave is also founder and Editor-in-Chief of ANGLE, a online and print publication focusing on the intersection between science, policy, politics and international affairs.

Frank Neffke

Frank Neffke has been a team leader at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna since July 2021. Before joining the Hub, Frank was the Growth Lab’s Research Director. He joined the Growth Lab at Harvard’s Center for International Development as a Research Fellow in 2012.

His research focuses on economic transformation and growth, from the macro-level of structural change in regional and national economies to the micro-level of firm diversification and the career paths of individuals. This research has shed light on topics ranging from structural transformation and new growth paths in regional economies, economic complexity and the role of cities, local labor markets, the importance of division of labor, human capital and teams in modern economies, the consequences of job displacement and the future of work.

Before joining CID, Frank worked as an assistant professor at the Erasmus School of Economics in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

He holds a Ph. D. in Economic Geography from Utrecht University and Master degrees in Econometrics and Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam.

Michele Coscia

Michele Coscia is currently an associate researcher at CID and assistant professor at the IT University of Copenhagen (ITU). He joined the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab as a Research Fellow in 2011.

Michele obtained his Master in Digital Humanities (2008) and his PhD in Computer Science (2012) from the University of Pisa. He then spent seven months conducting research at Northeastern University’s Center for Complex Network Research, led by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.

He is trained in data mining and his research is focused primarily on Complex Network analysis, particularly on multidimensional networks, i.e. networks expressing multiple different relations at the same time. At CID, his research focuses on human mobility and its relationship to the diffusion of knowledge and as a barrier to economic inclusion. At ITU, he focuses on developing new algorithms for network analysis and on the critical evaluation of their state of the art.

Juan Pablo Chauvin

Juan Pablo Chauvin is a Research Economist at the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank. His research focuses on the economic development cities and regions, with a focus on understanding the connections between labor markets, housing markets, and the industry composition of places. In the past, he has been a consultant with the German Technical Cooperation Agency (GiZ), the World Bank, the OECD, and the private sector; advising local and national governments in South America, Asia, the MENA region and Southeast Europe. He has also been an instructor at the Harvard Kennedy School and at Ecuadorian Universities. He holds a PhD in Public Policy and a Master in Public Administration – International Development from Harvard, a Master in Public Policy from FLACSO – Ecuador, and B.A.s in Sociology and Economics from Universidad San Francisco de Quito.