Carlos Schmidt-Padilla is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Penn Development Research Initiative (PDRI).

Broadly, his research interests encompass the political economy of development of Latin America and of sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, he studies questions concerning crime, human capital, migration, and policing under weak institutional settings.

Carlos received his doctorate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, in August 2021, where he was also a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development.