Rodrigo R. Soares is Lemann Foundation Professor of Economics at Insper, Brazil, and Professor of International and Public Affairs and Affiliated Professor of Economics at Columbia University (on leave). His research centers on development economics, ranging from health and demographic economics to crime and labor. His work has appeared in various scientific journals, including American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, and American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, among various others. Before joining Insper and Columbia, he taught at the Sao Paulo School of Economics-FGV, PUC-Rio, the University of Maryland, and the Harvard School of Public Health.

Rodrigo is an Elected Fellow of the Econometric Society and an Honorary Member of LACEA. In 2006, he was awarded the Kenneth J. Arrow Award from the International Health Economics Association for the best paper published in the field of Health Economics. He was also awarded three times the research prize from the Brazilian Economic Association (ANPEC), twice for the best paper (2006 and 2009) and once for the best PhD dissertation (2002). Rodrigo is research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA, Germany), research affiliate at J-PAL Latin America, and associate editor of the Journal of Human Capital, of the Journal of Demographic Economics, and of the IZA Journal of Development & Migration. He received his PhD in Economics under the guidance of Gary S. Becker at the University of Chicago in 2002.

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in January 2007.