Alvaro (Alva) Morales is pursuing a concurrent MPP-MBA with Yale's School of Management.
For five years prior to graduate school, Alvaro was a social entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology, media, and activism. He directed and produced virtual reality, augmented reality, and traditional documentary projects. His work ranges from using virtual reality technology to create “virtual reunions” between undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and their loved ones abroad, to using augmented reality for activist art installations, to covering “migrant caravans” from Central America. His projects have been supported by National Geographic, Verizon, Tribeca Film Institute, Meta, and Open Society Foundations, among others.
Most recently, Alvaro interned at the Office of the CEO of Avangrid, a leading sustainable energy company. In his first year at Yale, Alvaro was awarded the Coca-Cola World Fellowship for a summer internship at the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP). At GEAPP, Alvaro focused on grantmaking supporting South Africa’s Just Energy Transition. In the months prior to attending Jackson, Alvaro was a summer associate on the Innovation Team at the Rockefeller Foundation and an investment and behavioral design intern at Arifu, a Nairobi-based edtech company. Alvaro began his career at NERA Economic Consulting, where he conducted economic analyses for fixed-income securities litigation.
Alvaro was born in Huancayo, Peru and raised in Virginia. He earned a B.A. in economics, magna cum laude, from Amherst College. At Amherst, Alvaro was awarded the James R. Nelson Prize for top thesis in applied economics.