Rate My Professor Luca Maria Pesando

Luca Maria Pesando serves as Associate Professor of Social Research and Public Policy and Program Head of the Social Research and Public Policy program in the Division of Social Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. Prior to this, he was Assistant Professor of Sociology and Demography at McGill University’s Department of Sociology and Centre on Population Dynamics from 2019 to 2022, earning the William Dawson Scholar designation in 2022 for outstanding early-career scholarship. From 2018 to 2019, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Population Studies Center under NSF Grant 1729185. Pesando holds a Ph.D. in Demography (2018) and an M.A. in Demography (2016) from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.Sc. in Economic Sociology with Distinction from Bocconi University (2012), and a B.A. in Economics with Social Sciences Distinction from Bocconi University (2009), including exchange studies at Boston University.

His research examines social, economic, and digital demography, with a focus on family formation, poverty, inequality, gender dynamics, education, health, youth development, and technology adoption in low- and middle-income countries, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the US. Pesando integrates demographic and sociological theories with advanced econometric methods, big data analytics from Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and evaluations of randomized interventions. Current projects include “The Hopes and Hazards of Africa’s Digital Revolution” and Jacobs Foundation Fellowship studies on intergenerational effects of parental educational assortative mating and digital technologies’ role in mitigating educational inequalities. Pesando has garnered significant recognition, including the Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship (2022-2025), IUSSP Early-Career Award for Asia region (2025), Valeria Solesin Prize for the best Ph.D. dissertation in Demography (2020, Italian Statistical Society), Etienne van de Walle Prize for best graduate student paper (2018), Fulbright Scholarship (2014), and Benjamin Franklin Fellowship (2015-2018). Select publications feature “Safer if connected? Mobile technology and intimate partner violence” (Demography, 2022), “Educational assortative mating in Sub-Saharan Africa: Compositional changes and implications for household wealth inequality” (Demography, 2021), “The Internetization of international migration” with co-authors (Population and Development Review, 2021), “Declining quantity and quality of births in Chile amidst the COVID-19 pandemic” (Population and Development Review, 2023), and “Mobile Phones and Infant Health at Birth” (NYUAD Working Paper, 2023). As a research affiliate at the Population Studies Center (UPenn), Dondena Centre (Bocconi), Cornell Population Center, and CASER (NYU Shanghai), and consultant for UNICEF Office of Research and MIT Solve (LEAP Fellow), Pesando influences policy and academic discourse on global inequality and family change.