Andre Assumpcao

Andre Assumpcao joined the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow in June 2020.

His broad research interests span over the political economy of development; the economics of corruption; judicial politics; philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE); the morality of markets; and natural language processing (NLP) applications in the social sciences. More specifically, Andre is interested in understanding how government institutions can serve as mechanisms to induce growth and prosperity by providing public goods necessary to economic development.

Juan Paez

Juan joined the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab as a Research Fellow in 2020.

Before joining the Growth Lab, he worked at the Connectivity, Markets, and Finance Division of the Inter-American Development Bank, conducting research on access to finance and internet connectivity in Latin America and the Caribbean region. He also worked for the Macroeconomic Analysis Department of the Think Tank Fedesarrollo, covering macroeconomic forecasts for Colombia.

Juan holds a B.S. and a M.S. in Economics from the Universidad de los Andes, and a Master in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID, 2020) from the Harvard Kennedy School.

His research interests include public finance, macroeconomics, and international finance.

Farah Hani

Farah joined the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab as a Research Fellow in 2020. She became an affiliated associate in 2022.

Farah was a Research Manager in the Growth Lab’s Applied Research team. Prior to that, she was a Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Global Development, working on a labor mobility project that aims at building the case for more international labor mobility, and advocating for greater international cooperation on this agenda. Farah was also a senior consultant in PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Middle East between 2013 and 2017 and worked with government agencies across the Gulf on capability building projects, focusing on the area of human capital management.

Farah holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the American University of Beirut and a Master’s degree in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID) from Harvard Kennedy School.

Her research interests include labor market policies, with a focus on migration, governance, and growth diagnostics.

Johanna Ramos

Johanna Ramos is a former Growth Lab Fellow at the Center for International Development at Harvard University. Before joining CID, she worked at the Inter-American Development Bank at the Office of Evaluation of Oversight and the Education Division as research fellow. Previously, Johanna worked at the National Planning Department of Colombia and the World Bank as consultant. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree summa cum laude in Economics from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, a Master’s Degree in Economics from the same University, and a Master’s in Public Administration and International Development from Harvard Kennedy School (MPA-ID 2017). She is passionate about quantitative methods and data science. Her research interests include education policy, labor market policy, and gender inequality.

Lucio Castro

Lucio Castro is Global Fellow at the Wilson Center and consultant for international organizations based in Washington DC. Previously, he was Alternate Executive Director for Argentina and Haiti at the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB). Prior to that position, he served as Vice-Minister in the Ministry of Production of Argentina. He was also Director of Economic Development at CIPPEC, one of the principal think tanks in Latin America, and Practice Leader at Maxwell Stamp PLC, a leading economic consulting firm, in London, UK. He also worked in Emerging Markets´s finance at Morley Fund Management in London. He was visiting scholar at the Center for International Development (CID) in Harvard University and received the Fullbright Nexus Scholarship. He is  Affiliated Researcher at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA).  He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Sussex in UK and a Masters from the Program in Economic Policy Management at Columbia University.

Sebastian Galiani

Sebastian Galiani is Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. He obtained his PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford and works broadly in the field of Development Economics. He is also a Fellow of the NBER and BREAD. Sebastian was Secretary of Economic Policy, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Treasury, Argentina, between January of 2017 and June of 2018.

Sebastian is academic editor of PLOS ONE and associate editor of the Journal of Development Economics; Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and Latin American Economic Review. He published papers in the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of the European Economic Association, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Review of Economics and Statistics, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Economic Growth, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Labour Economics, Journal of Public Economic Theory, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Economica, Economic Inquiry, Health Economics, Nature, American Journal of Epidemiology and STATA Journal among others.

Sebastian’s work has been featured in Science, The NBER Digest, The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Magazine, Slate and many other newspapers and magazines around the world. He received the Konex Diploma in Development Economic (2006-2016). He has served as Scientific Director of JPAL-LAC and as member of the Board of Directors of JPAL, MIT. He has also worked as consultant for Gates Foundation, United Nations, Inter-American Development Bank, Innovations for Poverty Action, World Bank, and several governments around the world.

Pablo Andrés Neumeyer

Pablo Andrés Neumeyer is a professor of economics at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. His research is in the fields of macroeconomics, international finance and development. He has published theoretical and applied papers in several journals including American Economic Review, Econometrica and the Journal of Monetary Economics. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a Guggenheim Fellow and received de Premio Konex Platino (2016).

He obtained his PhD in economics from Columbia University in 1992 and studied economics as an undergraduate at Universidad de Buenos Aires. He was Argentina’s Central Bank’s chief economist between February 2016 and June 2018. He is a consultant in topics related to international finance and development for the financial industry, central banks, and international financial institutions. He has given seminars and public lectures at numerous throughout the Americas, Europe and Japan. He taught was a professor at the University of Southern California and taught at Stanford University, Universidad de Montevideo, Universidad de los Andes, University of Chicago, Universidad Pompeu Fabra, New York University, and Universidad Carlos III. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards.

He is the head of LACEA’s network on International Finance since 1999. He was chair of the Latin American Chapter of the Econometric Society and served in the Consejo de Administración Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Global Development Network. He is the founding editor of the blog Foco Económico and member of LACEA, American Economics Association, and Econometric Society

Bio en Español en UTDT

Juan Tellez

Juan Tellez served as Fellow at the Growth Lab from 2014-2016. After departing the Center for International Development, he worked as a Lecturer of Financial Econometrics at University of Neuchâtel as well as Lead Statistician at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (2016 -2017). He was an Associate in Model Risk Governance – Electronic Trading at JP Morgan in London from (2017-2019). He worked as a Director in Algorithmic Trading Strategies Validation at UBS (2019-2022).

He holds a Master in Economics (2005), a Master of Advanced Studies in Econometrics (2008) and a PhD in Econometrics (2014) from the University of Geneva. His previous research has focused on proposing new econometric methodologies that are useful in the areas of development, health, inequality and social and public policy. He was a research assistant in the Applied Economics Lab of the University of Geneva (2006) and a teaching and research assistant in the Department of Economics of the University of Geneva (2006-2012), for the courses of Econometrics, Time Series, Probability, Statistics and Mathematics. He was also a Boninchi scholar and visiting researcher at McMaster University in Canada (2010-2011) and he worked as a researcher in the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (2011-2013).

Stuart Russell

Stuart Russell formerly provided research and administrative assistance to the Growth Lab program. Originally from Ellicott City, Maryland, Stuart graduated from Swarthmore College in June 2014 with high honors in economics and political science. He also studied for a semester at the Institut d’études politiques de Bordeaux in Bordeaux, France through a Middlebury College program. While at Swarthmore, Stuart worked as a research assistant in the political science department and a teaching assistant in the economics department. He has previously worked as an intern with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C. and the U.S. State Department in Paris, France. 

Katherina Nguyen

Katherina Nguyen formerly led interactive interface design and data visualization work to support the Atlas development team and help showcase the center’s research initiatives. Previously, Katherina founded the Resident Designer program at StartX Accelerator, worked as internal design specialist at DataCollective Venture Capital, and independently consulted companies on design strategy across a range of industries for over four years. Katherina graduated with honors from Stanford University’s Science, Technology, and Society program. In a past life, she served the public sector at San Jose City Hall with local grassroots initiatives.