Elisa Xi Chen

Hello! I am a second-year PhD student in Education Policy at Harvard. I study how policy interventions in education can promote economic development and social cohesion.

My research has two strands:

1. AI in Education in Developing Contexts: Most of this work is in collaboration with the Computational Policy Lab at HKS. We build partnerships, develop human-centered AI tools, and evaluate their effectiveness at scale to support teacher training and student learning in developing countries.

2. Education, Prejudice Reduction, and Social Cohesion: I study how schools can serve as sites for social cohesion, particularly around gender and race, and how the norms and preferences shaped by everyday interactions in schools influence people’s educational and socioeconomic trajectories.

I am trained as an economist, but my work is broadly interdisciplinary: I develop computational methods, including natural language processing and computer vision, to construct large-scale datasets from historical and contemporary archives. I also conduct field experiments, employ causal inference methods, and draw insights from behavioral sciences and the humanities.

At Harvard, I am affiliated with the Center for International Development, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Embedded Development Lab at HGSE, the Computational Policy Lab at HKS, and the C.A.R.E.S. Lab at HGSE.

Previously, I was a Predoctoral Fellow and Director of Computer Vision at the MiiE Lab at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, where I was nominated as a Google Research Innovator 2023. I hold a BA in Mathematics, Economics, and History from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an MPP from the University of Chicago.

Outside of work, I play the harp and have had the pleasure of performing at several Chicago Public Libraries and cultural institutions. I also play drums and bass, and am trying to form a band in the underground music scene in Cambridge.