Jerik Cruz is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Center for International Development and the Reimagining the Economy project, whose research investigates the causes and consequences of the knowledge-based economy for the political economy of development. His book project examines how this new knowledge economy shifts the governance foundations for industrial policy away from past models of developmental states. In other work, he is studying the links between this same transition with the rise of illiberal populism in developing democracies, while combining computational, causal inference, and historical methods to reassess political economy theories of trade politics and state/bureaucratic capacity. He completed his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2026 in Political Science, focusing on political economy and computational methods.
Before his PhD studies, Jerik consulted as a development economist for international organizations such as the Asian Development Bank, the United Nations Development Program, and the International Labour Organization, among others. He is a recipient of the best paper prizes from the American Political Science Association for Comparative Policy as well as Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics; the MIT Open Data Prize; the MIT Homer A. Burnell Presidential Fellowship; and the Pralong Prize for graduate students in Switzerland. He also served as an advocacy strategist on multi-awarded public health, land rights, and environmental justice campaigns in the Philippines, including the campaign to legislate and implement the Philippines' Sin Tax Law of 2012, which is today funding the country's universal healthcare program.