SFI External Professor and Science Board member Ricardo Hausmann (Harvard University) was named co-chair of SFI’s Science Board at the board's 2022 spring meeting.
The principal role of the Science Board is to advise the President and the Board of Trustees on matters of scientific strategy for the institute. Hausmann joins co-chair Melanie Mitchell, SFI Davis Professor of Complexity, who has co-chaired the board since 2019 with outgoing co-chair Daniel Schrag (Harvard University), an External Professor.
“I am excited to serve as co-chair of the Science Board of SFI, a truly unique place," says Hausmann. "I have benefited enormously from its approach, which has been profoundly influential in my thinking. I hope to be able to pay back some of the intellectual debt I owe the institution.”
Since 2000, Hausmann has been a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where he is the Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy. At Harvard in 2006 he founded Growth Lab, a group of some 50 full-time researchers that work on the issues of inclusive and sustainable growth, covering theory, empirics and policy work with governments across the world. He has been an External Faculty of SFI since 2011 and a member of the Science Board since 2019.
But Hausmann has not just been an academic: his professional experience includes stints as Minister of Planning and member of the board of the Central Bank of Venezuela, as well as Chief Economist and Director of Research of the Inter-American Development Bank. He has helped governments in over 40 countries hone their economic growth strategies.
"Ricardo brings a unique combination of deep practical experience and rigorous systems thinking to issues of political economy," says SFI President David Krakauer, "And he is a mensch. What more could we ask for?"
Vice President for Science Jennifer Dunne adds, “I am delighted that Ricardo Hausmann is joining the leadership of our distinguished Science Board. His enormous scholarly and real-world impact on international development and economics is deep, broad, and fundamentally informed by complexity science approaches. As SFI begins our new program on Emergent Political Economies, funded by the Omidyar Network, Ricardo is poised to provide and elicit the best possible perspectives and advice on that and other SFI research initiatives.”