About me

Hello! Thank you for visiting my personal website. My name is Alejandro Arciniegas Herrera. I am currently a first year PhD candidate in Economics at the Sorbonne Economics Centre attached to Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne University. I am under the supervision of Prof. Léa Marchal.

My research explores how environmental shocks and policy interventions shape livelihoods and well-being in Latin America. In my first chapter, I analyze how sudden drops in food security in Venezuela push families across the border into Colombia, combining fine-scale crop‐loss maps with local migration records. The second chapter will examine Colombia’s Law 70, which gave collective land titles to Afro-Colombian communities: I’ll see its influence on poverty—through gains in food sovereignty, forest protection, and farm productivity, reading legal rulings with language models and tracking land‐use changes and productivity through remote sensing data. In the third chapter, I plan to build and train convolutional neural networks on multispectral satellite imagery, teaching them to spot different crops, follow their seasonal cycles, and produce detailed, seasonal maps of food production, offering a practical tool for keeping an eye on agriculture under a shifting climate.

I hold an M.Phil in Development Economics from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Javeriana University (Bogotá, Colombia). Do not hesitate to get in contact with me if you have any cool projects or questions I could help answer!