Alejandro Roa Contreras is a Ph.D. student in the Research, Analysis, and Design stream at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and an assistant policy researcher at RAND. He has an M.Sc. in methods for public policy analysis and a B.Sc. in public policy from the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE). Throughout his career, he has occupied executive roles, serving as a director, deputy director, and adviser in Mexico’s federal and state governments and the private sector regarding organized crime, national security, crime, drug policy, and anticorruption policy.
During his tenure as a public servant, he contributed to implementing quasi-experimental and non-experimental methodologies to assess crime trends, devising drug-related violence predictive models, and evaluating military-police joint operations targeting organized crime. In the private sector, he focused on developing data-driven strategies for public security, leading consultancy projects for both federal and state governments on crime, drug policy, critical infrastructure for national security, and data analytics aimed at improving police operations.
Roa Contreras specializes in converging quantitative methods and data analytics to improve policy decisionmaking. His research interests include data science techniques, data modeling, forecasting methodologies, and econometrics to a diverse array of policy topics, including drug policy, illegal markets, crime and violence prevention, public health, program evaluation, and law enforcement institutions.
M.Sc. in methods for public policy analysis, Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE); B.Sc in public policy, Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE)
