Jeremy McKey

Jeremy McKey is a Policy Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, where his research explores the political economy of digital public infrastructure. He is particularly interested in the evolving role of central banks in shaping digital payment systems, especially in middle powers such as India, Brazil, and South Africa. Broadly, he investigates how digital public infrastructure can serve as a policy framework to advance market competition, financial inclusion, state autonomy, and democratic renovation.

Previously, McKey served as Director of Special Projects at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), where he led a $14 million initiative to strengthen American democracy through reforms to political institutions, civil society, and civic culture. He also helped to design and launch the Trust for Civic Life, a grantmaking collaborative that supports rural civic organizations across the United States. Earlier in his tenure at the RBF, McKey supported the foundation’s president and CEO on a wide range of issues—fossil fuel divestment, U.S.-China climate collaboration, and peacebuilding in Iran and Afghanistan, among others—while also contributing to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship.

McKey holds an MPA from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, where he focused on democracy and technology policy and was awarded a Data-Driven Social Science Fellowship and Karl Edwin Prickett Fellowship. He earned his BA in philosophy from the University of Chicago, with minors in mathematics and classics. He also lived in Berlin for several years, where he worked as a teacher and translator.