Tim O’Brien

Tim O’Brien has managed Growth Lab applied research projects on five continents since joining the team in 2015.

He has led diagnostic work, capacity building, and execution of the Growth Lab’s overall research collaborations in South Africa, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Jordan, Albania, Western Australia, and Wyoming. Tim has also led the Growth Lab’s student engagement efforts, including the growth of its summer internship program, and works to build rich collaborations across Harvard Kennedy School research programs to target place-based challenges and practical research needs.

Before joining the Growth Lab, Tim completed the MPA/ID program at the HKS. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Malawi and holds a degree in mechanical engineering from Northwestern University.

Muhammed A. Yildirim

Muhammed A. Yildirim serves as the Director of Academic Research at the Harvard Growth Lab and an Associate Professor of Economics at Koç University. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University and a BS degree from the California Institute of Technology. Prior to joining the faculty at Koç University, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Development at Harvard University.

His research primarily focuses on understanding network and spillover effects across various research domains, including industrial policy, international trade, productivity, economic growth, and matching. His work has been published in prestigious economic journals, including Science, Nature, Cell, Nature Communications, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Methods, Economic Policy, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Economic Theory, Theoretical Economics, and Research Policy. Furthermore, he is a co-author of “The Atlas of Economic Complexity,” published by the MIT Press.

Dr. Yildirim’s research has garnered significant attention from global media outlets, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BBC, CNN, and the New Yorker magazine. In recognition of his contributions, Dr. Yildirim received the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship in 2015, the Young Scientist Award (BAGEP) from the Science Academy in Turkey in 2021, and Koç University’s College of Administrative Sciences and Economics Outstanding Faculty Award in 2021.

Shreyas Gadgin Matha

Shreyas Gadgin Matha is a Senior Computational Social Scientist at Harvard’s Growth Lab. With a background in technology and policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and dual degrees in Economics and Electronics Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, Shreyas brings an interdisciplinary perspective to his research.

At the Growth Lab, Shreyas collaborates with Prof. Ricardo Hausmann on economic research utilizing non-traditional data sources such as satellite imagery, textual data, international trade networks, citation networks, and credit card transactions. Some projects of note include analyzing the evolution of occupational tasks in the US over the past 80 years through BERT-based multi-label text classification models and studying production networks in Albania to understand the economic impacts of COVID-19 and shock propagation.

Previously, Shreyas was a Graduate Research Assistant to Prof. Jonathan Gruber at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society, Shreyas investigated the the impacts of US public R&D investments using NLP and econometric techniques. As a Graduate RA, his work contributed to the book “Jump-Starting America” by Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson, which explores strategies to revive American economic growth.

Prior to MIT, Shreyas was a Senior Research Associate at J-PAL South Asia, working on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate the impact of environmental policies in India. His projects included the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) for industrial particulate matter and the public disclosure of industrial emissions in Maharashtra, in collaboration with key governmental agencies.

Shreyas has authored several research papers and policy reports, and has also developed software tools such as py-ecomplexity, a Python package for economic complexity calculations that has been downloaded over 25,000 times, tools for zonal statistics using Google Earth Engine, creating detailed concordances between arbitrary classifications based on textual information, and data visualization platforms tracking country patents and publications, and a platform to visualize aggregations of global satellite imagery over detailed administrative boundaries.

Douglas Barrios

Douglas Barrios is the Director of Policy Research at Harvard’s Growth Lab, where he oversees the Lab’s portfolio of applied research collaborations with governments, multilateral organizations, and foundations worldwide. In this role, he leads the conceptualization of new research projects, talent management for a team of 40+ research fellows, and provides guidance — alongside Principal Investigator Ricardo Hausmann — across the Lab’s active country and policy research engagements.

Since joining the Growth Lab as a Research Fellow in 2015, Douglas has led and contributed to multidisciplinary research projects aimed at diagnosing growth constraints and designing strategies for productive diversification and inclusive growth. His work has spanned research projects in Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South Asia, Southeast Asia, and sub-national engagements in North America and Australia — applying growth diagnostics and economic complexity methodologies to inform policy at the national, regional, and city levels.

Previously, he worked in McKinsey’s Bogotá office as a Public Sector Specialist, serving public and social sector organizations across Latin America on topics including ICT promotion and education policy design. He also served as an external policy adviser for local governments and political campaigns in Venezuela.

Douglas holds a Master’s in Public Administration and International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School (MPA-ID 2012) and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the Universidad Metropolitana in Venezuela.

Ricardo Villasmil

Ricardo Villasmil joined the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab as a Research Fellow in 2017.

Before joining CID, he worked in private consulting in Venezuela managing projects on a wide range of strategic and organizational issues for over a decade.

His interests in development economics led him to the Andrés Bello Catholic University and to the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración (IESA), where he has been teaching courses in development and macroeconomics for the past fifteen years.

Ricardo’s involvement in public policy dates back to 1998, when he joined Venezuela’s Congressional Budget Office and the Ministry of Finance two years later. His interests in the practice of development prompted him to take advisory roles for Teodoro Petkoff in the 2006 runoff presidential election, for the democratic coalition between 2006 and 2012 and for presidential candidate Henrique Capriles as Head of his Public Policy Team in 2012.

Ricardo holds a Master in Public Policy from IESA, a Master in Public Administration from Harvard University and a PhD in Economics from Texas A&M University.

Dany Bahar

Dany Bahar rejoined Harvard’s Growth Lab as a Senior Research Fellow in 2022. He was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow from 2010 – 2014, and an Associate from 2014-2021. 

He’s also an Associate Professor of Practice of International and Public Affairs at Brown University’s Watson Institute, and a Faculty Affiliate of Brown University’s Economics Department. An Israeli and Venezuelan economist, he also is affiliated to the Brookings Institution, the Center for Global Development, CESifo Group Munich and IZA Institute of Labor Economics.

His research sits at the intersection of international economics and economic development. In particular, his academic research focuses on structural transformation and productivity dynamics, and how are these affected by factors such as migration, innovation, trade, investment, entrepreneurship and the diffusion of technology within and across borders. His expertise on policy issues includes international trade, migration and globalization more generally, as well as the understanding of economic trends in the global economy and in particular regions. His academic work has been published in top economic journals and he often contributes to leading media outlets in the United States and around the globe.

He has worked and consulted for multilateral development organizations, such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Bahar holds a B.A. in systems engineering from Universidad Metropolitana (Caracas, Venezuela), a M.A. in economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a M.P.A. in international development from Harvard Kennedy School and a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University.

Matté Hartog

Matte Hartog joined the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab as a Research Fellow in 2015. He served as a Visiting Fellow in 2014. 

His research focuses on the role of knowledge diffusion through external sources in fostering structural change of economies. For new economic activities to develop in countries, cities and firms, an influx of new capabilities is often necessary, which can be obtained through the inflow of organizations (for instance, multinational companies) and people from elsewhere. Matte particularly focuses on economic development in Colombia and Mexico.

He graduated from the London School of Economics with a Master degree in Local Economic Development and from Utrecht University with a Master degree in Human Geography and Planning, and conducted PhD research on economic development in Colombia, Finland, The Netherlands and Sweden. 

For more information, please see his Harvard Scholar page

Tim Cheston

Timothy Cheston joined the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab as a Research Fellow in 2014.

Prior to joining CID, Tim worked for the World Bank in the Social Protection and Labor team for the Latin America and Caribbean region, where he led in the design, negotiation, and supervision of major social protection and labor projects and research in the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Bolivia, and Belize. His experience also includes research on the use of psychometric screening tools for small business financing in South Africa with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) Africa. He also serves on the Board of Empowerment Health, an NGO providing community-based maternal and child health services in Afghanistan. Previously, Tim led remittance research with the Inter-American Dialogue, worked on microfinance with FINRURAL in Bolivia, and lived in the Dominican Republic, serving undocumented Haitian immigrants through the Dominican Literacy Project.

His research interests focus on: the role of economic diversification in explaining differences in growth between countries as within them; the use of growth diagnostics to formulate more effective economic strategy-making to unlock structural transformation processes; and the formulation of inclusive growth via productive development policies that better integrate the poor into high-productivity activities.

Tim holds a BA in the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs from Princeton University and a Master’s in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID) from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Sebastian Bustos

Sebastian Bustos is a Research Fellow at the Center for International Development at Harvard University. His research interests are the development of the private sector and how governments can solve market failures to accelerate the process. Sebastian holds a B.S. in Economics and Business Administration from University of Chile and a Masters in Public Administration / International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School. Before his studies at Harvard, Sebastian served as Economic Adviser to the Minister of Finance of Chile, focusing on capital markets and tax reforms. In recent years he has been a consultant for IADB, CAF and a number of national governments regarding industrial policy issues. Sebastian was born in Chile, loves traveling and sporting activities.