Adel Daoud is the PI of the Lab. He is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University, and Affiliated Associate Professor in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence for the Social Sciences, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. Previously he held positions at Harvard University, University of Cambridge, Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies, and the Alan Turing Institute. He researchers the impact of economic, political, and natural shocks on global poverty and health. Daoud implements novel methodologies in machine learning and causal inference to analyze the causes and consequences of human development. He has published in journals such as PNAS, World Development, Cambridge J of Economics, Food Policy, Epidemiology, International J of Epidemiology, and Ecological Economics.
Felipe Jordán and Adel Daoud conducted the foundational data work while both were employed at Harvard University in 2019. Felipe Jordán is a Postdoctoral Scholar at UCSB's Environmental Markets Lab. He obtained a Ph.D. in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University. Before his doctoral studies, he completed my B.S and M.S in Economics at Universidad de Chile and worked for a year as a lecturer at the Department of Economics of Universidad de Chile.
His research focuses on the political economy of sustainable development. He leverage machine learning methods to construct novel data from historical records and satellite imagery. He use these data to study the impact of policies and institutions on economic prosperity and environmental sustainability at the local and national levels, as well as the impact of environmental conditions on human populations. He is particularly interested in how indigenous cultural and institutional backgrounds interact with Western institutions to shape sustainable development and culture in indigenous communities. His doctoral dissertation explores the long-term impacts of three national-level institutions imposed upon the Mapuche people of Southern Chile: the reservation system that allocated land to Mapuche when forced to settle in the late 19th century, the system of directed industrial development that has promoted the expansion of plantation forests in Mapuche's homeland since 1974, and the system of courts that dealt with property rights within reservations between 1931 and 1979. His Job Market Paper exploits quasi-random variation in reservations' access to these courts to estimate the impact of national-level property rights enforcement on reservations' long-term development. Visit his web page to read about the projects he is currently working on http://www.felipejordanc.com/.
In collaboration with Adel and others, Shailen Nandy contributed to a project on global child poverty. He joined Cardiff University in September 2016 and teach on a number of undergraduate and post-graduate Social Science modules, and convene modules on International and Comparative Social and Public Policy. He is currently the Social Policy subject lead. Over the past 20 years my research has focused on different aspects of international development, and on poverty analysis and anti-poverty strategies.
Together with Markus Pettersson, Julia wrote her master thesis (Spring 2021) Using Self-Supervised Deep Learning to Predict Poverty from Satellite Data at the Division of Data Science and AI, Chalmers Technical University. On August 2021, she was recruited to Capgemini – Cloud Infrastructure Services, Oslo, Norway.
Jesper Strömberg was a master student in the Lab.
We have the pleasure of working with several students and collaborators at the Lab. Some of them stay in academia and others continue to industry position.