BIO and Cv

bio

Pablo A. Astudillo-Estevez is a doctoral researcher in Economic Geography and Complexity Economics at the University of Oxford (PhD advisor: Prof. Gordon L. Clark), a research fellow at the Growth Lab at the Center for International Development at Harvard University (working with Prof. Ricardo Hausmann and Frank Neffke) and a visiting fellow at the MIT Media Lab - Collective Learning Group (working with Prof. Cesar Hidalgo). His main interests lie in understanding how countries' economies evolve and in finding ways to unlock their potential to create knowledge, innovate and diversify to achieve long-term sustainable and economic development. Pablo is a curious person and he is passionate about exploring, learning new things and trying to understand the underlaying causes of everything. He firmly believes that anti-disciplinarity is the best way to find innovative answers to the world's most pressing challenges . Pablo enjoys developing interactive data visualizations.

Worried about the raising environmental challenges that the oil industry was producing in the Ecuadorian amazon, Pablo read Environmental Engineering for his first degree. His studies led him to discover the complexity of the social, economic and political dynamics that surround, not only the industry oil industry, but also development in general. While pursuing his degree, Pablo and some friends created the initiative GEO Juvenil Ecuador, which was later considered as the "most important youth initiative on the environment in the country". The initiative involved more than 2,000 young volunteers throughout the country and won two prizes from the World's Bank Development Market Fair.

After graduating, Pablo led the 350.org initiative for Latin America, which involved more than 100,000 people throughout the continent. In 2009, the 350.org initiate was catalogued by the media as the 'world's most widely distributed political action' and its activities were covered by the New York Times, CNN, among others. More than 5,400 actions in 135 countries were executed to raise awareness of climate change.

He has participated directly in the climate change and sustainable development negotiations under the United Nations since COP 15 in 2009. Pablo was part of the Ecuadorian negotiating team at the UNCSD Rio+20 that led to the establishment of the Sustainable Development Goals. Also, his last participation as part of the Ecuadorian Delegation at the UNFCCC negotiation was COP 21, whose outcome signaled an end to the fossil fuel era (the Paris Agreement).