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.
I study political information: its political economy and spillovers into political behavior in democratic contexts. My work spans the United States and India, two of the world’s largest and most polarized democracies.
My approach is computational and quantitative — I earned an MS in Statistics alongside my PhD, and work with causal inference, spatial econometrics, and network analysis. Before Illinois, I completed an MA in Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University and a BA (Honors) in Journalism at Lady Shri Ram College, both in New Delhi.
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 recently published breakingnews, an open-source Python package that segments broadcast news transcripts into individual stories, turning unstructured multi-hour text dumps into comparable story units for content analysis.
This summer, I am a Research Scientist on the Strategy and Insights team at Amazon in Washington, DC, applying causal inference, machine learning and large-scale behavioral measurement to questions about audiences. If our paths cross, I am always happy to grab a coffee and discuss shared interests or potential collaborations: sakshib3 [at] illinois [dot] edu.