Carissa Chen is a JD candidate at Yale Law School and a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Harvard University. She received a B.A. in History and Economics from Harvard, where her senior thesis – an intergenerational biography of the living descendants of enslaved people – received a Thomas T. Hoopes Prize for “outstanding senior thesis” and was featured in the New York Times and the Boston Globe. She received the Department of History’s college prize for the “best work of original historical scholarship” and fellowships from the Center for History and Economics and the Harvard Economics Department. She completed an MPhil in Economics at the University of Oxford on the Rhodes Scholarship.

Carissa and her co-authors developed the International Monetary Fund’s first machine learning methods for detailed predictions of economic activity in Sub-Saharan African countries. She drafted a white paper at the U.S. Treasury Department on corporate audits and their impacts on market competition, and published research on tax credits and improving the affordability of childcare. Carissa currently works on research at the intersection of machine learning and the law, and hopes to pursue a career as a law professor.

Carissa was born in Allentown, PA and grew up in Tustin, CA. She enjoys writing poetry and painting. She was a United States Presidential Scholar in the Arts for her poetry, and her work has been featured in the Kennedy Center Hall of Nations, the Kenyon Review, the Tupelo Quarterly, and BOAAT Journal, among others. Her paintings have been featured at the White House President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, the Warhol Museum, and the Harvard President’s inauguration. She volunteers as a preschool teaching assistant at her church in Cambridge, and hopes to write and illustrate a children’s book this summer.