Michela Carlana is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. She is affiliated with the Women in Public Policy Program, Harvard's Program in Inequality and Social Policy Group. Carlana is a faculty affiliate at LEAP-Bocconi University and a research affiliate at IZA-Institute of Labor Economics.

Her research agenda focuses on two main themes. First, she has studied the impact of exposure to gender stereotypes on performance in mathematics, self-confidence, and track choice of adolescents. Her recent work finds that teachers' implicit stereotypes can form an unintended and often invisible barrier to equal opportunity. She is currently working on concrete policies that can be implemented in order to alleviate the negative effects of gender stereotypes on female students. Second, she has worked on topics related to immigration. Her work in this area has ranged from field experiments aimed at reducing inequality in educational achievement of immigrants to quasi-experimental designs to analyze the effect of exposure to immigration on marriage and fertility of natives.

Carlana received her PhD from Bocconi University in June 2018 and she was a PODER-Research Fellow at IIES-Stockholm University in 2016-17.