UC San Diego is a global society of scholars dedicated to the advancement of knowledge through education and research. The 21st Century India Center will support faculty and research affiliates from a variety of disciplines including business and management, economics and political science, health and more from across campus.
Research Focus: worker wellbeing, firm productivity, women empowerment
Achyuta Adhvaryu is the Tata Chancellor’s Professor of Economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and is the inaugural director of the newly created 21st Century India Center. Adhvaryu’s research interests are in development economics, organizational economics and health economics, and his experience in organizational development make him well-suited to lead our new center. Prior to this role, Adhvaryu was a professor at the University of Michigan and an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health.
Research Focus: natural resource and environmental economics, urban, agriculture
Sayahnika Basu is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at James Madison University. Her research focuses on environmental economics with cross-cutting themes in urban, agriculture and development economics. One strand of her research is understanding how erratic weather patterns, natural resource extraction and climate change affects the global south, including India. Another focuses on public good provision and its implication on social as well as environmental justice. She is also the co-organizer of the research seminar series at the 21st Century India Center, UC San Diego. Prior to joining James Madison, she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Economics at UC San Diego.
Research Focus: environmental epidemiology, climate change and health, climate change impacts and adaptation
Tarik Benmarhnia is an environmental epidemiologist with University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His research interests include the impact of extreme weather events on human health in the context of climate change and advancing the notion of vulnerability and its implications for public policy. He also develops methodological approaches in order to evaluate the health impact of environmental policies such as climate change adaptation measures and air pollution regulations. Benmarhnia was recently selected as an associate editor for Environmental Health Perspectives. He also has given several public lectures including at the Fleet Science Center and has been featured in various publications such as Vice, Los Angeles Times, Wired, National Geographic and more.
Research Focus: fertility and labor markets, health impacts of air pollution
Prashant Bharadwaj is professor in the Department of Economics. His research interests are development and labor economics, with a focus on the interactions between fertility, health and labor markets. His research on India has included studies on infant mortality rates, population transfer, child labor, gender-based sexual violence and more. Bharadwaj is currently a co-editor at Journal of Human Resources and an associate editor at the Journal of Development Economics and the Journal of Health Economics.
Research Focus: emerging electricity markets, including China and India
Michael Davidson is an assistant professor jointly appointed at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at UC San Diego, where he leads the Power Transformation Lab. Davidson’s teaching and research focus on the engineering implications and institutional conflicts inherent in deploying low-carbon energy at scale to mitigate environmental harms, specializing in applications to China, India, and the U.S. Michael holds a Ph.D. in engineering systems and an S.M. in technology and policy from MIT, and a B.S. in mathematics and physics and a B.A. in Japanese studies from Case Western Reserve University. He has held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and received a Fulbright Fellowship to Tsinghua University.
Research Focus: health and environmental economics, climate change
Teevrat Garg is an associate professor of economics at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy. His research focuses on environmental policy and energy transitions in low- and middle-income countries. His current portfolio of research involves working directly with regional governments and utilities in understanding climate adaptation and decarbonization. In recent years, he has conducted research in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mexico, Uganda, Vietnam and California. His policy engagements include serving as an academic adviser to the Green Growth Initiative at the International Growth Center and serving as a technical contributor to the Fifth National Climate Assessment. He currently serves as editor for the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (JAERE).
Research Focus: education policy, high-skill immigration, public-works programs
Gaurav Khanna is an associate professor of economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy whose research focuses on development economics, labor economics and applied econometrics. Many of his current projects concentrate on education policy, high-skill immigration, infrastructure, public-works programs, conflict and crime. He has published multiple papers on education and economic development in India. Prior to joining the School of Global Policy and Strategy, Khanna was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., and a consultant for the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Unit.
Research Focus: reproductive and maternal health, agency, gender equity, gender-based violence, nutrition and HIV
Lotus McDougal, Ph.D., MPH, is a social epidemiologist with 15 years of experience researching issues of reproductive and maternal health, agency, gender equity, gender-based violence, nutrition and HIV across South Asia, South-East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. She has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications, conducted research on grants funded by multilateral, government and foundation sources, led multi-country monitoring and evaluation portfolios, coordinated community health education programs in humanitarian settings, and served as a consultant for UNICEF and UNAIDS.
Research Focus: agricultural and resource economics, financial services to micro-entrepreneurs
Craig McIntosh is a professor of economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy whose expertise focuses on program evaluation. His main research interest is the design of institutions that provide financial services to micro-entrepreneurs. He has conducted field evaluations of innovative anti-poverty policies in Sri Lanka, Mexico, Guatemala, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania. McIntosh also serves as co-director of the Policy Design and Evaluation Lab at UC San Diego.
Research Focus: education, health and social protection
Karthik Muralidharan is the Tata Chancellor’s Professor of Economics at UC San Diego. His primary research interests include development, public and labor economics. Specifically, he is driving innovative research on educational inequity and poverty alleviation in India. He is also an advisor to NITI Aayog, an influential Indian government body responsible for policy coordination, where he helps drive education policy implementation.
Research Focus: social media's impacts on political attitudes and behaviors in India
Gareth Nellis is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science who specializes in comparative politics and political economy. His research focuses on political parties, in particular the origins and persistence of weakly institutionalized party systems in India, and the extent to which parties matter for key development outcomes. He has also studied the drivers of discrimination against internal migrants in India’s fast urbanizing settings.
Research Focus: design, implementation and impact of anti-poverty programs
Paul Niehaus is an economist and entrepreneur working to accelerate the end of extreme poverty.
He is Chancellor's Associates Endowed Chair in Economics at UC San Diego and an affiliate of BREAD, CEGA, J-PAL, and the NBER. He is also co-founder of a series of companies working to amplify capital flows to emerging markets. He is co-founder, former president, and current director at GiveDirectly, the leading international NGO specialized in digital cash transfers and consistently rated one of the most impactful ways to give. He subsequently co-founded and served as a director of the enterprise payments company Segovia and the digital remittance company Taptap Send. Niehaus is a recipient of a Sloan Fellowship and has been named a “Top 100 Global Thinker” by Foreign Policy magazine. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.
Research Focus: state of gender equity and health in India
Anita Raj is the Tata Chancellor Professor of Medicine and the director of UC San Diego’s Center on Gender Equity and Health. She is also a professor of Education Studies in the Division of Social Sciences. Trained as a developmental psychologist, Raj’s current research focuses on the current state of gender equity and health in India and is directly supported by the Gates Foundation.
Research Focus: development economics, law and econ, and organizational economics in agriculture
Manaswini Rao is an assistant professor at the Department of Economics, University of Delaware. Her research interests include the fields of development economics, law and economics, and organizational economics in agriculture. She studies the frontline judiciary in India and the consequences of judicial capacity constraints on firm production. She also examines organizational structures including collective action in agricultural production and the role of rural land inequality in the process of structural transformation. Previously, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Economics, UC San Diego.
Torsha ChakravortyTorsha Chakravorty is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Economics. Her research fields include development and applied econometrics. As a research associate at the Indian School of Business, Torsha has worked closely with a State Government in India, on urban governance and productivity of public bureaucrats. She is interested in the design of government welfare programs and the role of private firms in implementing such programs. Another aspect of her research focuses on how students make higher educational choices and consequent labor market outcomes.
Research Project Title: "Heterogeneity in Bureaucrat Performance & Efficiency Losses in Public Service Delivery"
In this project, Chakravorty focuses on drivers of heterogeneity in bureaucrat performance in India. She attempts to quantify efficiency losses in public service delivery accruing from such differences, and repeated bureaucrat-citizen interactions. Using administrative data and detailed interviews with bureaucrats to inform sources of inefficiency, she aims to document the role of e-governance in identifying resource misallocation.
Aakash BhalothiaAakash Bhalothia is starting his third year as a Ph.D. student in the Economics department at UC San Diego. His research interests are development and labor economics, with a focus on gender, labor market inefficiencies, and migration in India. Before starting his Ph.D., Aakash was a Tobin Predoctoral Fellow at Yale University. He grew up in Delhi and graduated from UC Berkeley with degrees in Computer Science and Economics (High Honors).
Research Project Title: "Unpacking norms related to Female Labor Force participation in India"
Bhalothia is jointly working on projects with Riccardo Di Cato, aiming to understand the factors that impede female labor force participation, with a specific focus on cultural and social norms. They aim to delve deeper into specific norms in the context of women's employment and gain an understanding of which norms act as binding constraints. They are also interested in the thin markets for household chores and childcare in India, as improving these markets can have large gains for female labor force participation. So far, they have conducted focus groups in rural Jharkhand, in collaboration with the Good Business Lab (GBL). After additional focus groups in urban areas, they plan to design an intervention that improves the functioning of domestic help and childcare services and evaluate if that has a meaningful impact on female labor force participation in India.
Riccardo Di Cato
Research Focus: non-governmental organizations and development, women's employment, historical political economy
Riccardo Di Cato is a Ph.D. student at the UC San Diego interested in development and political economy. His research focuses on the relationships between NGOs and state capacity, female labor force participation in India, and historical determinants of development and political economy. Prior to starting his Ph.D., Di Cato was a predoctoral fellow at Bocconi University and a research associate for Harvard University in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He holds a Master of Economics from the University of Bologna and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pavia, which included study abroad programs in France and Canada."
Research Project Title: "Unpacking norms related to Female Labor Force participation in India"
Di Cato is jointly working on projects with Aakash Bhalothia, aiming to understand the factors that impede female labor force participation, with a specific focus on cultural and social norms. They aim to delve deeper into specific norms in the context of women's employment and gain an understanding of which norms act as binding constraints. They are also interested in the thin markets for household chores and childcare in India, as improving these markets can have large gains for female labor force participation. So far, they have conducted focus groups in rural Jharkhand, in collaboration with the Good Business Lab (GBL). After additional focus groups in urban areas, they plan to design an intervention that improves the functioning of domestic help and childcare services and evaluate if that has a meaningful impact on female labor force participation in India.