Javier Rojas Aguilera

Javier Rojas is an assistant policy researcher at RAND and a Ph.D. student in the Research, Analysis, and Design stream at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He has an M.S. in computational analysis and public policy from the University of Chicago and a B.S. in economics from Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Prior to joining Pardee RAND, he was an econometrician in the Colombian National Planning Department, where he worked on research projects to support national policymaking, including analyses of macroeconomic time series and the behavior of socioeconomic variables, such as unemployment and the arrival of Venezuelan refugees. He also worked as a research assistant at the University of Chicago’s Center for Spatial Data Science in the Healthy Regions and Policies Lab, where he developed software to study local opioid risk environments. His research interests include urban science, sustainable development, artificial intelligence, causal inference, and large-scale data analysis.