My latest CV is available here.

I am a PhD candidate in Sociology and Demography at the University of California, Berkeley.

One area of my research quantifies disparities in health by gender, caste, and religion. In our paper, "Social disadvantage, economic inequality, and life expectancy in nine Indian states," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, my coauthors and I found that marginalized caste and religious groups in India have lower life expectancy than more privileged groups, with gaps as large as the Black-White life expectancy gap in the United States. This paper was awarded the Population Association of America’s 2021 Dorothy Thomas Award for the best graduate student paper on the interrelationships among social, economic, and demographic variables.

In a separate stream of research, my dissertation examines the neglect of pregnancy loss, both in early and late stages (i.e. stillbirths), in demographic research. This neglect leads to a mischaracterization of global health challenges. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, my research grapples with three interrelated questions about how the devaluation of women’s experiences of pregnancy and pregnancy loss shape demographic data collection practices and statistics:

  1. Why, how, and by whom was it decided that global health surveys and vital registration systems would collect detailed data on live births, and deprioritize data collection on experiences of pregnancy?
  2. How would counting stillbirth specifically, and pregnancy loss more broadly, meaningfully change demographic measures of mortality and fertility?
  3. What are the social processes that lead to stillbirth’s undercounting?

Parts of this work have received a PAA Best Poster Award in 2023, First Place in the graduate student poster competition at the 2023 All-University of California Demography Conference, and First Place in the graduate student poster competition at the 2024 All-UC Demography Conference. A working version of my paper, "Population science implications of the inclusion of stillbirths in demographic estimates of child mortality” can be found here.

Much of my research concentrates on India, where I have lived and worked on issues of rural health and development for periods of time since 2005. For the past decade, I have been a part of a team of researchers at the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (r.i.c.e.), a non-profit organization focused on child health in India. My interests continue to be rooted in and shaped by my field research there, though my current projects and future research plans now also extend to other countries, both rich and poor. My experiences in India have also shaped my approach to research which includes the use of both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies to understand questions from multiple perspectives.

I have an MA in Sociology and an MA in Demography from UC Berkeley, an MPA from Princeton University, and a BA in Economics and Political Economy from UC Berkeley.