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.

Lili Vessereau

Lili Vessereau is a Research Fellow at the Harvard Growth Lab, focusing on sovereign debt, public finance, and trade economics. Lili previously worked at the World Bank, in an advisory position within the French Government at the Ministry of Finance, at the United Nations, and gained experience in investment banking.

A former Bretton Woods 2.0 Fellow at the Atlantic Council, she is also a European Investment Fund Empowering Equity Fellow, a GLOBSEC Young Leader, a European Leadership Network Young Leader, and a Global Shaper of the World Economic Forum. She has held fellowships with Google, OSCE, the University Consortium (Sciences Po, Harvard, Oxford, Columbia), and served as France’s Youth Delegate to the Council of Europe.

Lili holds Master’s degrees from the Harvard Kennedy School (Public Policy, With distinctions), Sciences Po Paris (Public Affairs), La Sorbonne (Law, With Honors), and HEC Paris (Finance, Dean’s List), equipping her with a multidisciplinary perspective on finance, governance, and sustainable development.

Nils Rochowicz

Nils is a Visiting Fellow at the Growth Lab for the fall term 2025, working on understanding and predicting the dynamics of economic complexity. He is a PhD student in mathematics at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford University, and a PhD student in economics at the Chemnitz University of Technology.

Nils’s broader research agenda centers on technology: Where do new technologies come from, and how do they impact the economy and society? He has worked on technology prediction, measurement of patent novelty and impact, evolution of technology networks, effectiveness of technology policies, industrial policy, and the labour market impacts of new technologies. To tackle these questions, Nils develops and uses advanced tools from mathematics, physics, and network science, and aims to combine these with methodologies and insights from economics.

During his stay at the Growth Lab, his research focusses on studying the combinatorial and economic processes underlying economic complexity at fine-grained levels. To do this, he leverages novel methodologies to understand how economic complexity changes with respect to changing trade patterns and economic policies. In a second project, he uses highly disaggregated firm level datasets to understand how firm-level economic processes shape the evolution of country-level comparative advantage. Furthermore, he is interested in understanding and measuring economic complexity at the technological frontier.

Thomas Abt

Thomas Abt is a Senior Research Fellow with the Center for International Development, where he leads CID’s Security and Development Seminar Series. He is also a member of the Campbell Collaboration Criminal Justice Steering Committee, member of the Advisory Board of the Police Executive Programme at the University of Cambridge, and a Senior Fellow with the Igarapé Institute in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Both in the United States and globally, Abt writes, teaches, and studies the use of evidence-informed approaches to reduce urban violence, among other criminal justice topics. His forthcoming book, Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence – and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets, was published by Basic Books in June 2019. Abt’s work is frequently featured in major media outlets such as the Atlantic, Economist, Foreign Affairs, New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, and National Public Radio.

Before joining Harvard, Abt served as Deputy Secretary for Public Safety to Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York, where he oversaw all criminal justice and homeland security agencies, including the Divisions of Corrections and Community Supervision, Criminal Justice Services, Homeland Security and Emergency Services, and the State Police. During his tenure, Abt led the development of New York’s GIVE (Gun-Involved Violence Elimination) Initiative, which employs evidence-informed, data-driven approaches to reduce gun violence.

Before his work in New York, Abt served as Chief of Staff to the Office of Justice Programs at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked with the nation’s principal criminal justice grant-making and research agencies to integrate evidence, policy, and practice. He played a lead role in establishing the National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention, a network of federal agencies and local communities working together to reduce youth and gang violence. Abt was also founding member of the Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative, a place-based development effort that was recognized by the Kennedy School as one of the Top 25 Innovations in Government for 2013.

Abt received a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Michigan and a law degree with honors from the Georgetown University Law Center.

Ljubica Nedelkoska

Ljubica Nedelkoska joined the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab as a Visiting Scholar in 2012 and as a Research Fellow in 2013.

Before joining the CID, 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.

Victoria Suarez Rubio

Victoria joined the Growth Lab as an applied Research Fellow in 2025. Her professional background centers on economic governance and public finance reforms. Prior to this role, she worked as a consultant with the World Bank, where she contributed to public expenditure tracking and supported anti-corruption initiatives in West Africa. She previously served as Chief of Staff at the European Parliament, leading negotiations on EU anti-money laundering legislation and EU Recovery and Resilience Facility. Earlier in her career, she worked as an analyst with the Insights team at the World Energy Council and helped found a social start-up in Spain focused on alleviating youth unemployment. Victoria holds a Master of Public Administration with a specialization in Economic Policy from the London School of Economics, as well as a dual degree in Law and Business Management from Complutense University of Madrid.

Her research interests include the role of governance and institutional factors in economic growth, private sector development policies and economic diversification.

Juan Carlos Orrego

Juan Carlos Orrego joined the Growth Lab as a Research Fellow in 2024. Before joining the Growth Lab, Juan Carlos dedicated his career to crafting and strengthening Peruvian public policies, first at a private consulting firm and later within the public sector at the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Economy and Finance.

During his time in government, he focused on designing and implementing results-based financing mechanisms that reward institutions financially for meeting predefined targets. Most recently, he served as a Policy Fellow in the New Mexico State Government, where he contributed to the state’s economic development plan update. Juan Carlos holds a Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Universidad del Pacífico in Lima, Peru.

Karan Daryanani

Karan is an Economic Analysis and Data Management (EADM) Fellow at the Growth Lab, where he leverages developments in network science, machine learning, and economic complexity to advance the green growth research agenda. He is committed to building platforms for climate intelligence, most recently having developed deep learning pipelines for research at Harvard Business School’s Climate and Sustainability Impact Lab. 

Earlier in his career, he built analytics tools at Closed Loop Partners, and scaled climate technology ventures at Fashion for Good and Yunus Social Business. Karan holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics, Political Science, and Sociology from Christ College, Bangalore, and a Master’s in International and Development Economics from Yale University.

His research interests are in computational methods for social science, sustainable innovation, and understanding transition dynamics in complex adaptive systems.

Santiago Segovia

Santiago Segovia is an Economic Analysis and Data Management Fellow at Harvard’s Growth Lab, where he applies his expertise in data science, economics, and policy analysis to support research on global economic growth. He holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Economics from Universidad Externado de Colombia and a Master’s in Computational Analysis and Public Policy (MSCAPP) from the University of Chicago.

Prior to joining Harvard, Santiago served as a Senior Advisor in the Financial Stability Department at the Central Bank of Colombia, where he led the implementation of AI-driven tools to enhance policy decision-making and strengthen financial stability frameworks. His role also involved international collaborations to train advanced and emerging economies in financial stability methodologies.

He gained further international experience as a consultant with The World Bank, leveraging geospatial data for spatial welfare analysis. His technical proficiency spans data science, machine learning, and geospatial analysis, with several impactful projects developed at the University of Chicago’s Data Science Institute, where he contributed to community-driven initiatives. As a Summer Fellow at Imago Global Grassroots, Santiago used data science techniques to evaluate the impact of large-scale social development programs in India, specifically analyzing women-led initiatives.

His diverse experiences reflect a commitment to using data-driven insights to address global economic and social challenges.