Ricardo Rosselló, PhD
Public-sector incentives — policy design, governance, and systems under crisis.
Ricardo Rosselló, PhD is a scientist, the 12th Governor of Puerto Rico, U.S. Congressional Delegate for Puerto Rico, and co-founder of The Incentives Lab. He works on incentive design in the public sector: how policy shapes behavior at population scale, why government transformation stalls, and how institutions make decisions under crisis conditions.
Ricardo Rosselló, PhD is a biomedical engineer, scientist, and the 12th Governor of Puerto Rico. He now serves as U.S. Congressional Delegate for Puerto Rico and co-founded The Incentives Lab to apply incentive design to public systems.
He studied Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at MIT, earned a PhD in Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology at the University of Michigan, and completed post-doctoral stem-cell research at Duke. His work sits at the intersection of science policy, governance reform, and the incentive structures that determine whether public institutions serve or stall.
Full biography and career historyCredentials
What Ricardo works on
Policy as incentive design
Every statute is a payoff structure. Most are written as intentions and read as loopholes.
Why government transformation stalls
Public institutions reward the avoidance of blame more reliably than the delivery of outcomes.
Decision-making under crisis
What hurricanes, fiscal collapse, and emergency governance reveal about incentives when time disappears.
Recovery economics
Disaster funding creates its own incentive landscape — and it rarely rewards speed.
Essays by Ricardo Rosselló
What Crisis Reveals About Incentives
When time disappears, institutions stop performing their values and start revealing them.
Why Government Transformation Stalls
Public institutions reward the avoidance of blame far more reliably than the delivery of outcomes.
Every Policy Is an Incentive System Wearing a Statute
Governments write intentions. Citizens read payoffs. The gap between the two is where policy fails.