I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science and a Research Associate at the Center for the Politics of Development at the University of California, Berkeley. My research sits at the intersection of gender and representation, party politics, and the political economy of development, with a focus on India.

In my work, I look at the effects of political institutions, such as quotas and party organizations, on women’s political participation, ambition, and representation, as well as citizen engagement with politics. This research spans India, Zambia, Malawi, and the United States. I employ various research methodologies, including experiments, observational causal inference, and qualitative interviews and shadowing. My current book project identifies an understudied political institution with global relevance - women’s wings - to provide a novel explanation for women’s absence at the top of political hierarchies as candidates and senior party leaders. I triangulate between qualitative theory-building, original descriptive data, and experimental findings to propose and test a novel theory of the “political glass wall” - a combination of institutional barriers and male elite gatekeeping that prevents women politicians from advancing in political parties.

In the past, I have worked and published in the information environment and misinformation space. I have worked as a research analyst at Graphika and as a researcher for the Information Environment Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I was also a Senior Data Science Fellow at the D-Lab at UC, Berkeley, where I developed curriculum on the use of large language models (LLMs) in early-stage research and use of Qualtrics to design surveys and experiments. I hold a B.A. in Politics and minors in South Asian Studies, Political Economy, and Quantitative and Analytical Political Science from Princeton University and an M.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.