Shelby Carvalho

Shelby Carvalho is a PhD candidate at Harvard University studying comparative politics and political economy.

Carvalho’s dissertation examines the factors that shape host government decisions about policies related to refugee inclusion in Africa. Focusing on the case of inclusion in national education systems, she illustrates the ways that features of political environments shape long-term opportunities available to refugees. Her work speaks to the broader question of when and how governments are incentivized to pursue and implement public policies that prioritize equity for vulnerable populations and explores what the consequences can be when they’re not incentivized to do so.

Carvalho holds master’s degrees in public policy from the University of Texas at Austin and in education policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. At Harvard, she is a political economy and policy fellow with the REACH Initiative on Refugee Education and a former graduate research fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She was awarded the 2023 Jeanne Humphrey Block Dissertation Award from Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences. Her work has been funded externally by the Fulbright US Student Program, the Weiss Fund for Research in Development Economics, and Innovations for Poverty Action. Development Policy Review, the Journal on Education in Emergencies, the Journal of Refugee Studies, and World Development have published her research. Her work is informed by more than a decade of experience as a K–12 teacher and as a policy professional with the World Bank, the Center for Global Development, and UN organizations.