Profiles
Luca Maria Pesando
Education Researcher (Foundational Learning)
Luca Maria Pesando is an Educational Measurement and Learning Assessment consultant at the UNICEF Office of Research (Innocenti), where he provides support to the Data Must Speak (DMS) Positive Deviance research. He is a demographer and sociologist interested in issues of family poverty and inequality, gender and development, intra- and inter-generational processes, and interactions between life-cycle events and human capital accumulation. Recently, his research has focused on the role of technology adoption (smartphones, Internet access, etc.) on socio-economic and demographic outcomes across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). He is currently a faculty member in the Department of Sociology and Centre on Population Dynamics at McGill University, Canada. He obtained his Ph.D. in Demography and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania (2018) and his MA (2012) and BA (2010) in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University, Italy. He has extensive experience conducting applied research and he has worked in policymaking at the United Nations, the OECD Development Centre, and J-PAL/Innovation for Poverty Action.