Andrea Musso

Andrea Musso  joined the Growth Lab as a Visiting Fellow in 2024.

He is a 3rd-year PhD student in Computational Social Science at ETH Zurich, mentored by Prof. Dirk Helbing. Previously he obtained a Master’s in Mathematics from the same institution. He is interested in leveraging large datasets to better understand city growth, urbanization, and structural transformation.

Adriana Arreaza

Adriana Arreaza, a Venezuelan national, joined the Growth Lab as a Visiting Fellow in 2024. She is an economist with over twenty years of experience in macroeconomics and development. She joins us from CAF, Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, where she serves as Director of Macroeconomic, leading innovative economic reports, providing sovereign analysis to inform executive-level decision-making, and developing research products to support country strategies. She also served as CAF’s interim Chief Economist, overseeing the bank’s research publications. She has extensive academic experience, lecturing and participating in conferences internationally.

Adriana holds a Ph.D. in economics from Brown University. 

Robert Pell

Bob Pell joined the Growth Lab as a Visiting Fellow in 2024. He is an urban planner with a career in forming, building and leading multidisciplinary firms and teams across five continents. He has worked in the UK in the public sector and then private consulting, mostly in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. In 1999 he moved to the USA and for ten years he worked for AECOM, the largest publicly traded AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) firm, where he was the Director of Operations. In 2016, Bob joined Hatch, a Canadian international consulting firm, where he created a unique international team – Urban Solutions – a team of urban economists, planners, designers and policy analysts- in the USA, Canada, UK, South Africa and Australia.

In 2023 Bob was a Fellow in the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative where he worked on forming a coalition to work with cities and communities in developing countries that are tackling the issues of climate change, urbanization and economic growth opportunities. 

Bob has a degree in Politics and Economics from University of Southampton, UK and a Graduate Diploma in Town Planning from Oxford Brookes University, UK.

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.

Victoria Burnham

Victoria Burnham is the Executive Coordinator for the Growth Lab at Harvard’s Center for International Development. In this role she works alongside the senior team assisting the Growth Lab Director, Professor Ricardo Hausmann, and serves as a direct liaison to lab faculty, staff, fellows, students, and important external contacts. 

Prior to the Growth Lab, Victoria worked as a Project Coordinator for the Technology and Public Purpose Project (TAPP) within Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, where she supported the fellowship for technologists, investors, and policymakers to explore avenues for reducing societal harms and protecting public purpose values. Before Harvard, Victoria served as a Special Assistant to the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration in Washington, DC. Victoria has also worked on numerous political campaigns, including presidential, state, and local campaigns. 

She received her bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Brigham Young University-Idaho, and a master’s in International Relations of the Middle East from Durham University in the United Kingdom. Her master’s thesis focused on female jihad and included a comparative analysis of different causes of western women and MENA women joining the Islamic State 

Roukaya El Houda

Roukaya joined the Growth Lab in 2022 as a Senior Research Fellow as part of the Applied Research team.

Before joining the Growth Lab, Roukaya worked as an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company, where she led strategy and implementation projects for public and private organizations in Africa, focusing on power and infrastructure. Previously, she worked at the GSMA as a User Research Manager investigating the impact of mobile-based services on low-income households. Prior to that, Roukaya was an Operations Consultant for four years, working on improving the performance of manufacturing plants and optimizing the supply-chain of firms in Europe, United States and Brazil. She also worked for the World Bank at the Africa Trade & Transportation unit, where she was part of the design, negotiation, and supervision of major transportation infrastructure projects in West and Central Africa.

Roukaya holds an MSc in Engineering from Ecole National des Ponts et Chaussées (Paris), an MSc in Operations Research, and a Master’s degree in Public Administration in International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Her research interests focus on: labor markets, the knowledge economy, and industrial policy.

Yomna Mohei Eldin

Yomna joined the Growth Lab at Harvard’s Center for International Development as a research fellow in 2023. Before joining the Growth Lab, Yomna worked as an economist in the Central Bank of Egypt in the Money and Capital Markets department working on monetary policy research, fixed income research, and leading capital markets’ development projects. Yomna holds a Master in Public Administration in International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School and a dual bachelor’s degree in Economics and Finance from the American University in Cairo. Her research interests focus on growth, monetary policy sovereign debt, and the implications of climate change and the green transition on countries’ macroeconomic policies.

Alejandro Rueda-Sanz

Alejandro joined the Growth Lab at Harvard’s Center for International Development as a Research Fellow in 2022. Previously, he worked at the Lab as a Research Intern for the Colombian Amazon Project from 2021-2022. 

Before joining the Lab, Alejandro worked for six years for different Colombian government institutions on issues ranging from macroeconomics to rural development policy. Most recently, Alejandro worked as Impact Measurement Executive at Bancoldex, Junior Researcher at Colombia’s Central Bank and an Advisor to Colombia’s Deputy Minister of Rural Development.

Alejandro holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Economics from Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, with a minor in Portuguese and an Master in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID) from Harvard University with a Management Certificate. Alejandro’s research centers on growth diagnostics, rural, agriculture and land policy, and productive development.

Farah Kaddah

Farah joined the Growth Lab at Harvard’s Center for International Development in 2022.

Prior to joining the Growth Lab, Farah obtained her Master’s degree in Public Policy from Georgetown University. Her career spans both government and research roles focusing on topics such as labor, skills, eductaion, and gender. Notably, Farah served as an Advisor to the Ministry of Education in Egypt, where she played a key role in the design and implementation of the national technical education reform in her country. Farah has also contributed to various research projects, collaborating with institutions such as the World Bank and the Georgetown University Initiative on Innovation, Development, and Evaluation. Her research efforts covered impact evaluations and public expenditure reviews spanning regions such as East Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. As a Research Fellow at the Growth Lab, Farah has worked on several of the Lab’s projects in Saudi Arabia, the State of Wyoming, and Azerbaijan. Her work focuses on inclusive employment, skills, migration, and gender.

Farah holds a double bachelor’s in Economics and Political Science from the American University in Cairo (AUC) and a Master of Public Policy from Georgetown University. Her research interests include labor markets, education, gender, and fragile and conflict-affected situations.