About
All things Good, True, and Beautiful have captivated Alexander Mercier. Attracted to science from an early age, he seeks to quantify, express, and interpret his own interconnected understanding of nature. Drawn to the fields of mathematics, arts, and biology, Alexander completed a dual degree in [pure] mathematics (B.A.) and microbiology (B.S.) with a minor in Russian at the University of South Florida (USF), graduating Summa Cum Laude in the spring of 2022 and was considered the “outstanding graduate” of that graduating class, receiving the Ralph C. Wilcox Outstanding Graduate Award. Moreover, during his time at USF, Alexander was proud to be a Marshall Scholarship Finalist and USF’s first Rhodes Scholar Finalist.
Alexander is a former member of the Kramer Ecology Lab, where he performed research in the fields of disease ecology and network theory. Additionally, born out of a research fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute, Alexander works with Drs. Cristopher Moore and Samuel Scarpino on network sparsification towards further insights into disease spread on networks.
In the fall of 2022, Alexander Mercier traded USF Green and Gold for Harvard Crimson. He joined the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Population Health Sciences — with a concentration in Epidemiological Methods —under the advisement of Dr. James Robins, specializing in causal inference subject to interference. His Ph.D. work centers on efficiency theory for estimators of randomized experiments subject to interference, jointly carried out with Drs. Rajarshi Mukherjee and Subhabrata Sen.