I am a PhD candidate in Media and Communications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Scott Althaus. I hold the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship, the university’s most prestigious award for incoming graduate students.
My work has appeared in the Journal of Communication and Information, Communication & Society. My working paper “Following the News: Polarization and the Networked Structure of Attention” won the Top Paper Prize at the 2026 International Communication Association meeting.
I study political information: its political economy and spillovers into political behavior in democratic contexts. My approach is computational and quantitative — I hold an MS in Statistics and draw on causal inference, spatial econometrics, and network analysis. Before Illinois, I studied Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Journalism at Lady Shri Ram College in New Delhi.
I published breakingnews, an open-source Python package that segments broadcast news transcripts into individual stories. It applies parameter-efficient LLM adaptation to transform unstructured multi-hour text dumps into comparable story units for further analysis.
This summer, I am a Research Scientist at Amazon in Washington, DC, applying causal inference, machine learning and large-scale behavioral measurement to questions about audiences.
You can contact me at sakshib3[at]illinois[dot]edu.