Hi and welcome to my website!

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. My interests are in public policy research with a particular interest in the selection and training of administrative personnel and a regional focus on India. My research is supported by grants and awards from Johns Hopkins SAIS and the Gupta-Klinsky India Institute.

My research examines the sub-national political economy of state capacity in developing countries, with a focus on the institutional processes that shape the recruitment and allocation of government personnel. Using a mixed-methods approach, I analyze how bureaucratic staffing patterns emerge and persist within different political and administrative contexts.

I primarily work with administrative data drawn from government reports, notifications, orders, and memoranda to study recruitment policy design and implementation. In addition, I scrape data from newspapers and e-courts databases to identify institutional and legal bottlenecks that constrain capacity-building efforts.

Additionally, I am a research assistant for Professor Devesh Kapur having worked on A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey. I am also a research assistant for Professor Yuen Yuen working on The Polytunity Project at SNF Agora Institute.

Before beginning my Ph.D., I worked as a policy researcher, with contributions and citations appearing in reports of state-level committees, the Reserve Bank of India, and the World Bank’s World Development Report 2025. I was also a Teach for India Fellow, teaching children from low-income communities in Delhi and Mumbai.

You can view my CV here. And if you want to know what I look like: the picture is below.