I am political scientist and mixed method policy, strategy, and trust and safety researcher with regional expertise in South Asia. My academic research focuses on representation and responsiveness at the level of local governments in India and other contexts; social media content problems (e.g., hate and misinformation) and their effects on social attitudes; and survey and behavioral measurement. In 2019, I joined the Civic Integrity Team at Meta where I conducted research on online violence and incitement, the experiences of under-represented groups, and misinformation in the global south to shape global content policies.
I am currently a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, research consultant at the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and Community Change, and Senior Fellow at Tech Global Institute. I am also a contributor to the Trust and Safety Teaching Consortium at Stanford University and active member of the Integrity Institute.
My academic work focuses on representation, responsiveness, electoral behavior, and politician-voter linkages at the level of elected local governments in India. My research draws on fieldwork with local politicians and voters, survey experiments, and cross-referenced surveys (asking voters about their leaders and vice versa) that employ behavioral measurement. My work has been published in Electoral Studies, Party Politics, and Perspectives in Politics, and has been supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, the American Political Science Association, and Pitzer College. Ongoing and future research focuses on local leaders’ social preferences in Mexico, policy feedback and local voter turnout in the U.S., and the relationship between local social preferences and representatives’ distributive behaviors in India. My research designs have been applied by other scholars in research on clientelism in urban and rural India and the Philippines.
From 2019 through 2022, I conducted policy and product research at Meta (formerly Facebook) that informed company content moderation policies, crisis response, and product changes designed to mitigate the spread of harmful content in the global south. My work shaped multiple policies that reduced exposure to harmful content in the global south by tens of millions of views, led to design changes such as warning screens, and developed novel research designs (adopted across the company) to understand new content harms and the online experiences of vulnerable populations around the world. See my portfolio here.
I joined Community Change, a national non-profit, in 2023 as a research consultant to inform grassroots strategies related to local voter mobilization and the political impacts of policies passed by the Biden administration. I am also involved in freelance projects related to social media election risks and democratic transitions and tech policies in the global south.