Melissa Dell is the Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics at Harvard University's Department of Economics, part of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She holds affiliations with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) as a faculty research fellow and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) as a Global Scholar in the Institutions, Organizations, and Growth program. Her research focuses on the interplay between state structures, non-state actors, and economic development, particularly in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Education includes a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT (2012), a Bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Harvard University (2005), and an M.Phil. with Distinction from the University of Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar). Her research interests span Development Economics, Political Economy, and Economic History, with notable studies on drug violence in Mexico, colonial economic legacies in Peru and Vietnam, and the impact of historical state policies on current economic trajectories. Her work often integrates large-scale historical datasets and computational methods, such as digitizing archives and applying machine learning to analyze economic patterns over time. Recent research trends include developing frameworks for robust inference with unstructured data, historical news analysis, and computational tools for economic history (e.g., EfficientOCR, LinkTransformer). These projects emphasize bridging historical and modern data to understand long-term economic dynamics. Awards and honors include the Rhodes Scholarship and Harvard Society of Fellows Junior Fellowship. Her contributions span academic leadership, interdisciplinary collaborations, and policy-relevant economic analysis.
