PRIMO Alumni Profile Details

“I think PRIMO is honestly for everyone. If you have any inkling that research might be your thing, you should do it. It absolutely inspired me to get my PhD.”

About

Jo Ellery, originally from Traverse City, Michigan, graduated Harvard College in 2021, with an A.B. in Applied Mathematics. Jo is very fond of their home state. “Home to the largest pie plant in America, as far as I know,” as they shared more about their upbringing. Jo’s dad, a retired engineer, ran a pie plant making pies. Jo’s mom, a retired social worker, now works at a bakery. Both of their parents have master's degrees, but Jo didn’t know anything about academia at all growing up, let alone how to comprehend what a PhD was.

Jo left Michigan for the first time to come to Harvard College and pursued applied mathematics —a quantitative major combining mathematics, computer science, and economics tracks. Interested in academic research, they applied to PRIMO their sophomore year. “I was very excited. I was really thrilled.”

They worked with Professor Matt Weinzierl in the Business, Government and the International Economy Unit during PRIMO Summer 2019. Together, they focused on rationales for the use of legal precedent, the evolution of values and morality, and some other topics, all in the service of understanding how we evaluate what is good. Jo continues to work with Matt today.

Jo started their PhD Program in Fall 2022 in the Business Economics track at HBS. They’re interested in public economics, macroeconomics, and labor economics.

What kind of research did you and your professor work on?

I was excited by Matt’s research project, which was very philosophical. It was very much a question of, what ideas did we have in the past that we’ve lost? Honestly, it’s a question that still fascinates me to this day because in economics, it’s very true that we get distracted by shiny new things. And, what happened in economics 20 or 30 years ago, which might have actually been good ideas, but we do not think about them anymore. That's even more true when you go back further.

So, we were thinking a lot about history. For example, I spent some time working on the history of the Hippocratic Oath. The history of legal precedent and precedent as a way of maintaining thoughts and the institutionalization of the importance of past knowledge.

What’s something you learned from PRIMO that has helped you now as a PhD student?

Having done real research really started with PRIMO. I ended up working for Matt for the rest of my undergraduate career. And, PRIMO was what got me that opportunity. Seeing what Matt was doing and having it be called “economics” was eye-opening for me because of how much philosophy he puts into his research and how much deep thought there was about the whys. He definitely inspired me to say, I knew I was going to be applied mathematics, but applied math in what? History... Economics... what am I going to be? And I think that definitely inspired me to pursue economics.

Any advice for incoming PRIMO students?

Oh, do it, for sure. It was a great summer. It was incredible. I think if you do it and you love it, that's a really good indicator that you should try to seek out more research opportunities and think about it long-term. If you do it and you don't like it, well that's great too. That just means research probably isn't for you.

It's such a good three-month time span. The immersive one-on-one relationship with the faculty and the ability to really dig in on a project are such good opportunities for people in that stage of their undergraduate career, that you can really get a sense of what it means to do research for the first time, at least for me. I just think it's honestly for everyone. If you have any inkling that research might be your thing, you should do it.