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, ethnic politics, and the politics of development, with a focus on South Asia. One line of my research looks at how transformative changes in the welfare state affect ethnic politics. 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.