Welcome

Hi! I’m Dario. I’m a PhD student in Political Science at UCLA. I study the political economy of development.

Before starting my PhD, I worked in a number of roles at the intersection of social science and public policy. I served as the inaugural Director of Research for the Penn Development Research Initiative - DevLab@Penn (PDRI) at the University of Pennsylvania. Before that, I was an Advisor with the Behavioural Insights Team’s (BIT) Canadian office in Toronto. I helped build BIT’s Canadian practice in its first two years of existence. Earlier, I was part of the Incubator team at Evidence Action in Washington, DC, an NGO that scales evidence-based development interventions to improve the lives of millions in low-income countries. I worked on sourcing, designing and prototyping development interventions backed by rigorous academic research. At some point before that, I was at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), where I did research on international trade, competition, and firm dynamics.

I hold an MA from Johns Hopkins SAIS and a BSc in economics from Vienna University of Economics and Business.

You can access my CV here.