Mohammad Jalali (‘MJ’), PhD

Mohammad Jalali (aka, ‘MJ’) is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School based at MGH Institute for Technology Assessment. He is also a research affiliate and senior lecturer at MIT Sloan’s System Dynamics Group and a faculty affiliate with the Harvard Data Science Initiative. MJ uses data science and simulation-based approaches to help policymakers identify and develop high-leverage policies that not only are effective over the long haul but also are not thwarted by unanticipated side effects. To achieve this goal, he spends a great deal of time working with decision-makers and policymakers, doing fieldwork, and collecting different types of data that can inform richer models and analyses.

Since 2019, MJ has received over $8 million in grant funding, and his work has been featured by The New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, The Hill, WIRED, Newsweek, Scientific American, Business Insider, Boston Globe, and NPR, among others. He has been a reviewer for the National Science Foundation, an associate editor for System Dynamics Review, academic editor for PLOS ONE, and editor for the Journal on Policy and Complex Systems. He is the recipient of the 2015 Dana Meadows Award, the 2015 WINFORMS Excellence Award, and the 2014 Lupina Young Researcher Award. Before joining Harvard in Feb 2019, MJ was a research faculty at MIT Sloan and a consultant at the World Bank.