Brandon de la Cuesta

Brandon is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Center on Food Security and the Environment, working primarily with Marshall Burke and other members of the Environmental Change and Human Outcomes (ECHO) lab to estimate the impact of climate change on various measures of political accountability. He specializes in comparative political economy and causal inference with a strong regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Many of his current projects involve the use of machine learning algorithms, particularly convolutional neural nets, to create global, high-resolution data that can be used for downstream inference tasks. A development economics application was recently featured as the cover article in Nature.

Brandon received his PhD in Politics from Princeton University in August 2019. Prior to coming to Princeton, he earned an MPhil in International Relations from Cambridge University. He completed his undergraduate education at the University of California, Irvine, where he received a B.A. in Political Science.