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; social media content problems and their effects on social attitudes; and survey methods. At Meta, I joined the Civic Integrity Team to study social media content problems (e.g., misinformation hate speech) and their connection to offline risks to human rights and conflict. I am affiliated with the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, the Integrity Institute, and Community Change, a national nonprofit working on US elections and policy issues. I am also a participant in the Trust and Safety Teaching Consortium at Stanford University.
My academic work focuses on the political economy of local governments, responsiveness and electoral behavior; and social preferences in the context of rural India. My research draws on fieldwork, survey experiments, and cross-referenced surveys using 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 policy feedback and local voter turnout in the U.S., local-level (district/county) state capacity, and the relationship between local social norms and distributive behaviors in rural India.
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 democratic backsliding and tech policies in the global south.
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.