Uniting
Research and Policy

Kashif Ahmed, MPP’22 is a junior economist at IDinsight India in their Delhi office, a client-facing research organization that provides services that include a wide range of data and evidence tools. At Harris, he worked as a research assistant for Philip K. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies Oeindrila Dube on a project that explores the relationship between secular media and religiosity in Pakistan. He was a research assistant at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) for Professor Fiona Burlig, a position he began in the summer of 2021 as a Summer Bartlett Fellow. In his summer, Ahmed oversaw the monitoring of endline survey data collection for a randomized controlled trial of cash transfers to migrant workers in Mumbai during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. He spent his second year with EPIC doing literature review and survey design for a clean water allocation randomized controlled trial that sought to improve child health outcomes in rural Odisha, India. He also worked part-time in his summer for Professor Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra on research studying the moral psychology of armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and was a teaching assistant for six courses. He served as the co-chair of the Harris students’ International Development Policy Association, the Harris Student Government Academic and Election Governing Committees, and was selected as the Class of 2022 Student Convocation Speaker.

Prior to his time at the University of Chicago, Ahmed worked as a research associate for Wageningen University & Research of the Netherlands. He worked for a randomized controlled trial called One Health in collaboration with the government of Sierra Leone. One Health’s aim was to improve both animal and human health by training community animal health workers in rural areas dependent on livestock rearing. Ahmed led field teams to conduct an impact evaluation of the project in rural Sierra Leone and contributed to research into incentives and recruitment strategies for civil servants. Ahmed also has spent time volunteering as a teacher in rural areas of Peru and Uganda, and editing for an online international affairs publication based out of Yale University.

Ahmed holds a BA in honours international development studies with a minor in economics from McGill University. He is conversational in Spanish.