Jeremy Weinstein, professor of political science and faculty co-director at the Immigration Policy Lab, will depart Stanford this summer to begin an appointment as dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Over his two decades at Stanford, Weinstein has made significant contributions to the study of political violence, ethnic politics, migration, and the political economy of development and democracy. He has also worked extensively in Washington, including serving as Chief of Staff and then Deputy to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations between 2013 and 2015.
Weinstein brought his academic and policy expertise to IPL when he joined as a faculty co-director in 2016. He expanded IPL’s research portfolio beyond the US and Europe, creating the lab’s Migration and Development Initiative (MDI) focusing on migration in the Global South. His efforts helped broaden IPL’s expertise and deepen its impact. Through Weinstein’s leadership on Planning for Productive Migration (PPM)—an innovative project that supports safe, legal, and productive labor migration in West Africa—IPL has played an important role in pushing governments and donors to consider how international aid could be used to enable, rather than discourage, productive migration in order to improve development outcomes.
In addition to PPM, Weinstein has served as a principal investigator on IPL projects that examined the drivers of return among Syrian refugees in Lebanon, public attitudes towards refugees in Jordan, and refugee and asylum policies in low- and middle-income countries. His work on the Dataset on World Refugee and Asylum Policies (DWRAP) provided some of the first global insights on asylum policy trends in the Global South, leading to a partnership with the World Bank to build the first globally comparable dataset of national policies on forced displacement in 193 countries spanning 1952 to 2022.
“Jeremy is the model of a responsible, incisive, and impact-oriented scholar. He helped IPL reach new frontiers in research and innovation on migration policy. His leadership on MDI has brought us into new policy spaces and established a strong foundation for us to provide practitioners with the evidence and tools they need to effectively unlock the development potential of migration around the world. We are grateful for his contributions to the lab and look forward to continuing to work with him as he takes on a new challenge at Harvard.”
IPL Executive Director Adam Lichtenheld
Weinstein also played an important role in developing GeoMatch, connecting IPL to resettlement agencies through a workshop that sparked the idea and partnerships for a matching algorithm. This led to IPL’s groundbreaking research on using AI to facilitate refugee resettlement, which is now in use in the US and Switzerland. Finally, Weinstein launched IPL’s Reporting Null Results project, promoting the publication of studies with no significant effects, which aims to mitigate the issue of publication bias within academic research and facilitate the sharing of research on what policies and programs do not work—not just which ones do.
“Jeremy has been a wonderful leader and mentor for staff and students alike at IPL. He approaches work with a true collaborative spirit, always ensuring that our research is actionable and geared towards real-world impact. He leads by example demonstrating how to be an exceptional scholar, a respectful and thoughtful collaborator, and a global citizen. We wish him the best in his new role at Harvard Kennedy School!”
IPL Program Director Jessica Sadie Wolff
Weinstein will continue to support ongoing MDI research through his transition to Harvard, serving as a faculty affiliate on PPM and other IPL projects.
