I am a senior research fellow at the Growth Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a member of the External Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Previously I was a researcher and Leading Technology and Policy Fellow at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT in the Trancik Lab. I was a graduate fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and Boston University where I completed a PhD in physics.

My research explores the dynamics of technology and its impacts. I examine individual technologies at a micro/engineering scale (esp. low-carbon technologies such as EVs and solar modules), as well as the collective effects of technology at macroeconomic scales (esp. for economic growth and diversification). Some specific research directions include attributing technology cost changes to drivers (this, this and this); relating rates of a technology improvement to properties of structure (this and this); statistically predicting the energy needs of electric vehicles (this and this); comparing the environmental impacts of using differing greenhouse gas equivalency metrics to evaluate the emissions of technologies (this); and examining the network structure of industries (this) and its relationship to economic growth (this) and structural transitions (this).

I am broadly interested in understanding how the characteristics of technologies and the processes by which they change bring about performance improvement, adoption, environmental impacts, and macroeconomic outcomes. I typically approach these problems with both data-driven and theory-driven analysis, emphasizing a bottom-up perspective and using networks and/or engineering descriptions of technology.

Email: james_mcnerney at hks dot harvard dot edu