CV — Emile Djohi

Summary

Pre-doctoral researcher with expertise in development economics, applied econometrics, and climate-conflict dynamics. Current work focuses on the causal links between climate extremes, economic stress, and political violence in Central America, West Africa, and South Asia, using large-scale panel datasets, geospatial methods, and machine learning for causal inference. Strong background in fieldwork, survey design, and policy-relevant research across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Education

Jan 2025 – May 2026

Predoctoral Research Fellowship

University of Pennsylvania · PDRI-DevLab · GPA: 3.77/4.0

Supervisors: Erik Wibbels, Guy Grossman & Irina Marinov

Sep 2021 – Oct 2023

M.Sc. in Mathematics, Economics & Statistics

African School of Economics · Benin · GPA: 4.0/4.3

Thesis: "Development of a Web-Based Diagnostic Tool for Real-Time Classification and Visualization of Affected Areas in Colposcopy Images." Supervisor: Zimé Songbian.

Sep 2018 – Jul 2021

B.Sc. in Statistics & Computer Science

African School of Economics · Benin · GPA: 15.65/20

Thesis: "Impact of Digitalization on the Economy of WAEMU Countries." Supervisor: Nicodème Atchadé.

Experience

Research Experience

Jan 2025 – Present

Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow

Penn Development Research Initiative (PDRI-DevLab) · University of Pennsylvania

Constructed cross-country monthly climate-conflict panel datasets integrating ERA5, SPEI, MLEED, EM-DAT, and FAO food-price series across 20 Central American countries (2012–2024).
Designed and estimated distributed-lag, panel fixed-effects, interaction, and climate-threshold models to test climate-conflict pathways.
Applied ElasticNet regularization for data-driven lag selection, improving model parsimony and out-of-sample fit.
Developed automated geospatial extraction workflows for temperature, precipitation, and drought indicators at the administrative-unit level.
Applied Python-based analysis to assess climate impacts on agriculture and migration in Central America, contributing to the Global Climate Security Atlas (Marinov Lab, Penn EII); work named in Penn Today and Phys.org (Jul. 2025).
Contributed to a cluster-randomized evaluation of a school- and community-based intervention targeting sexual violence in Liberia (150 dyads; 2,160 girls, 1,187 caregivers); conducted HFCs, monitored safeguarding triggers ensuring 26 disclosures were escalated under the differentiated referral protocol.
Evaluated GPT-4 and Gemini for geographic entity extraction from conflict-related news text; benchmarked against CLIFF-CLAVIN and human-coded data (2026).

Sep 2023 – Dec 2024

Pre-Doctoral Research Assistant

African School of Economics (ASE) · Benin

Led data harmonization across large-scale multi-country surveys for COVID-19 socio-economic impact studies in Benin, Burkina Faso, and South Africa.
Produced food security analyses using FCS, DDS, and rCSI indicators; informed monitoring reports and policy briefs submitted to development partners.

Sep 2021 – Sep 2023

Research & Teaching Assistant

Institute for Empirical Research in Political Economy (IERPE) · ASE

Collected, cleaned, and processed data; conducted econometric and geospatial analyses using R, Stata, Python, and QGIS.
Coordinated field teams and ensured data quality across survey rounds.
TA for Mathematics for Economics, Linear Algebra, Econometrics, and Algorithms & Computation.

Professional

Professional Experience

Apr 2023 – Jul 2023

Assistant to the Technical Director

Ministry of Digitalization · Cotonou, Benin

Developed machine learning tools for plant pathology detection; contributed to disease-detection projects (including malaria) and supported cross-departmental project coordination.

Apr 2021 – Jul 2021

Intern, Customer Experience Service

MTN Benin · Cotonou, Benin

Designed and supervised an online customer satisfaction survey; applied predictive modeling to identify drivers of churn; produced actionable recommendations adopted by the CES team.

Skills

Technical Skills

Programming

RPythonStata MATLABCHTMLMySQL

Software

RStudioStataJupyter QGISLaTeXVS CodePyCharm

Methods

EconometricsCausal Inference Panel DataTime Series Machine LearningGeospatial Analysis Distributed-Lag ModelsMediation Analysis

Honors

Scholarships, Awards & Certifications

2021–2023World Bank Excellence Scholarship

2018–2021ASE Excellence Scholarship

2025CITI — Social & Behavioral Research Refresher · University of Pennsylvania

2025CITI — Human Research & Social/Behavioral Research · University of Pennsylvania

—Macroeconomics Diagnosis · International Monetary Fund

—Financial Markets for Public Policy · Princeton University

—Data Science: Machine Learning · Harvard University

—Impact Evaluation & Reproducible Research · World Bank Group

Full CV