Uniting
Research and Policy

Alexander Walsh is an MPP student at the Harris School of Public Policy and is originally from Traverse City, Michigan. His areas of interest include foreign policy, economic development, international law, and behavioral economics. In addition to joining the fellowship at the Pearson Institute, he is an International House Graduate Fellow at the University of Chicago.

Prior to his studies at the University of Chicago, Alex served in the AmeriCorps as part of Michigan College Access Network (MCAN)’s College Completion Corps program, which places academic coaches at community colleges throughout the state of Michigan to provide extra support to first-generation and low-income students, as well as others from underprivileged backgrounds. During his second year as an academic coach at Northwestern Michigan College (NMC), Alex served as an advisor for both NMC’s Student Veterans of America chapter and the Multicultural Club, the latter of which grew exponentially from three co-founding students to an active membership of over thirty-five students, resulting in the Multicultural Club being recognized as NMC’s 2024 Student Group of the Year. Among Alex’s most cherished experiences at NMC was mentoring refugees from Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Ukraine and assisting with their transition to U.S. higher education.

Alex is a prior-enlisted U.S. Navy veteran who served from 2013-2019, and he was stationed aboard the USS Carney (DDG 64). While in the Navy, Alex served on five deployments, and between the Navy and his own personal travels, he lived in Andalusia, Spain for about 3.5 years and visited thirty different countries, including Eastern Europe and parts of the Middle East and North Africa.

Following his honorable discharge from the Navy, Alex transferred to Harvard College, graduating with an A.B. in Government in 2022. His honors thesis sought to explain why many military veterans forgo benefits and support programs available to them utilizing insights from behavioral economics. Alex also worked as a research assistant for the Negotiation Task Force at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and he currently volunteers as a research assistant at the Sustainability Transparency Accountability Research (STAR) Lab at Harvard University.