Emiliana Vegas

Emiliana Vegas is a professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research and practice focus on improving educational opportunity in developing countries. She earned a doctor of education degree from HGSE, a master's of public policy degree from Duke University, and a bachelor's degree in communications from the Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas, Venezuela.

Before returning to HGSE, Vegas was co-director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings. Between 2012 and 2019, she was chief of the education division at the Inter-American Development Bank, where she oversaw the Bank’s lending operations and technical assistance projects throughout Latin America and Caribbean countries. Before joining the IADB, she spent over ten years at The World Bank, where she led research and operations focused on education systems in a various low- and middle-income countries. She is a faculty affiliate at the Harvard Center for International Development and co-chair of the Global Education and Research: Unleashing Potential (GEAR:UP) program. She has written extensively on issues affecting education systems in Latin America and the Caribbean and other developing regions. Her papers and books cover topics including policies to leverage technology to accelerate learning and skills development, raising teacher effectiveness, school finance policies, and early childhood development policies. Her book, Let’s Change the World: How to Work Within International Development Organizations to Make a Difference, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in September 2024.