Chinemelu Okafor is a PhD Candidate at Harvard University.

Her research lies at the intersection of comparative politics, political economy of development, and economic history. Specifically, she quantitatively explores how the economic and social legacies of pre-colonial (and colonial) eras continue to shape contemporary political and economic development outcomes across Africa. Her research interests also include public economics.

Chinemelu is a Harvard Graduate Prize Fellow, Karl Deutsch Fellow and Graduate Student Associate with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She also works as a research collaborator with the London Business School’s Wheeler Institute for Business and Development and is a PhD affiliate at Harvard’s Center for International Development and Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

Chinemelu’s work has been supported by the Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Harvard Government Department and the Harvard Center for African Studies. It has also been circulated as a working paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

In 2023, Chinemelu received a Forbes 30 under 30 North America award in education, for her work as the founder and president of the Research in Color Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to increasing the representation and retention of historically excluded scholars in economics and economics-adjacent fields through mentorship and financial support.

Chinemelu has worked previously with institutions such as the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, and the United Nations on topics ranging from private sector firm development in emerging markets to identifying challenges to micro, small and medium enterprise operations.

From 2023–2024 Chinemelu served as a Staff Economist with the White House Council of Economic Advisers under the Biden Administration working on topics related to international trade. Previously she was a fellow in the Emerging Scholars in Political Science Program at Princeton University from 2019–2021.

Chinemelu holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and international studies from the University of Michigan and a master’s in applied economics from George Washington University.