Santiago is Assistant Professor at the Economics Department in Universidad del Rosario. He holds a PhD in Economics from Stanford University and a B.A. in Economics and B.S. in Mathematics from Universidad de los Andes. 

His research interests are in Development and Environmental Economics.  In particular, he is interested in how economic development affects natural resources, and how this in turn affects the path out of poverty. To overcome data availability limitations, he uses spatial and computational tools. He has studied the response of illegal mining to a change in royalty taxes and health effects of gold mining in Colombia. Deforestation after the peace agreement and communal land titling. He has also studied the migration of miner networks and the labor supply of biketaxis in Kenya.