Emmanuel Letouze

Founding Connection Science Fellow

Dr Emmanuel Letouzé is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona (2021-23) and the Director of Data-Pop Alliance, a not-for-profit non-governmental organization he founded in 2013 with the MIT Media Lab, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) and ODI. He is a Founding Fellow at MIT Connection Science and a Visiting Scientist at HHI. Emmanuel co-founded the Open Algorithms (OPAL) project and served as Executive Director of the OPAL pilots in Senegal and Colombia in 2017-2020. He serves as an appointed member of the European Commission’s Expert group on the use of private data for official statistics, and is a founding member of the Technical Advisory Group of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data (GPSDD). His work focuses on the applications and implications of data, statistics, technology and AI for development and democracy in the Global South, especially Latin America and the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle-East and North Africa region, and South-East Asia. He is the author of UN Global Pulse’s White Paper on “Big Data for Development” (2012), where he worked as Senior Development Economist, and of the OECD’s 2013 and 2014 Fragile States reports. He worked as an Economist for UNDP in New York (2006-10) on poverty, conflict, and migration, including on the Human Development Report Office research team, and in Hanoi, Vietnam, for the French government as a Technical Assistant in official statistics, public finance and macroeconomics with Vietnam’s General Statistics Office, Ministry of Finance, and National Assembly (2000-04). He holds a BA in Political Science (1997) and an MA in Applied Economics-Economic Demography (2000) from Sciences Po Paris, an MA in International Affairs-Economic Development (2006) from Columbia University, where he was a Fulbright Fellow, and a PhD in Demography (2016) from the University of California, Berkeley, where his dissertation focused on cell-phone data analysis for demo-economic research, followed by a post-doctoral position (2016-17) with the MIT Media Lab. As a cartoonist as “Manu” he has contributed illustrations and political cartoons for media and organisations in France and the US and held a solo exhibition at the Invisible Dog Art Center in New York.