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.