Bio

Matt Lerner took over as the head of Founders Pledge's research team in July 2021. He is a quantitative social scientist by training, and has worked previously as a data scientist and journalist at the World Bank and the Economist. His past research includes large-scale surveys of entrepreneurs in the developing world, development of an open-source toolkit for measuring the returns to education, and a graduate thesis on the effects of direct cash transfers. He speaks rapidly deteriorating Arabic and Spanish, and in his spare time he likes to play guitar and draw weird little cartoons.

Q&A with Matt

Q: If you could choose anyone famous (real or fictional) to have dinner with who would they be and why?

Nancy Mitford, with full confidence that she'd be as funny in person as she was in print.

Q: As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A theoretical physicist. I think I just liked the sound of it.

Q: If a movie was made of your life what genre would it be, who would play you?

I'd play myself, naturally, in a mockumentary about "my" time as a champion skee-ball player trying to transition into electoral politics.