I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. I completed a PhD in political science at Yale University. I research democratic accountability and the politics of development, with a focus on South Asia. One line of my research looks at the political impact of the digital welfare state. A second strand seeks to explain why decentralization often fails to deliver expected improvements in public goods provision, local state capacity, and political responsiveness. A third line of work focuses on why citizens don’t hold elected officials accountable for bad outcomes like air pollution and inadequate response to public health crises. I employ a mixed-methods approach to study these issues, using experiments, observational analyses, and extensive fieldwork. My research draws on first-hand experience of the world of politics. Prior to the PhD, I worked for a year and a half fielding and analyzing surveys for India’s Congress party in its election war-room. Apart from research, I have taught a wide range of graduate-level quantitative methods courses and undergraduate-level comparative politics courses. In 2020, I received a university-wide award for excellence in teaching.
My research has been supported by Penn Global’s India Research and Engagement Fund, the MacMillan Center’s South Asian Studies Council, the Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy, and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
Student evaluation
Visualization of Political and Social Data , Fall 2021, Undergraduate
Student evaluation
Advanced Quantitative Methods, Fall 2019, Graduate
Student evaluation
Design and Analysis of Field Experiments, Spring 2018, Graduate
This course uses Field Experiments: Design, Analysis, and Interpretation (by Alan Gerber and Donald Green) as a textbook, covering one chapter each week.
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