María Fayos Herrera (Valencia, 1992) is a joint degree candidate at Harvard University, pursuing the Master’s in Public Administration and International Development (MPA/ID) at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Master of Business Administration (MBA) at Harvard Business School.

Her goal at Harvard is to better understand the interaction between the public and private sector, in order to be able to design public policies that would set the right incentives for private companies and society. She believes that the coordination between public and private entities will be critical to overcome the unprecedent challenges that we are facing as a society, such as the transition towards greener energy sources, the reform of the pension’s system in developed countries, or the taxation of the digital economy in a globalized world, just to name a few.

Her motivation to pursue a career at the crossroads of the public and private sector stems from her four-year experience advising countries on economic and financial issues, first in the World Bank Natural Resources Management practice and then within Lazard Sovereign Advisory Group, where she focused on emerging countries funding and debt management challenges.

On the academic side, after her high school studies in Spain, Maria obtained a French scholarship for academic excellence to enroll into the French engineering world of “Grandes Ecoles”. In 2016, she graduated from Mines ParisTech, one of France’s top engineering school, with a Master of Science.

In 2019 she received Harvard’s Presidential Scholarship and Harvard’s Rubenstein Fellowship to the public service commitment and academic excellence, as well as the Real Colegio Complutense Fellowship.