I am a PhD candidate in Media and Communications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I hold the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship. I am advised by Prof. Scott Althaus.
My work has appeared in the Journal of Communication, Information, Communication & Society and others. My 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 the politics of information across two substantive areas: (1) what the high-choice environment makes available, what it leaves out and its consequences for democratic information flows; and (2) how institutional control and technological shifts shape information supply and political behavior. 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 trained in linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University and journalism at Lady Shri Ram College in New Delhi.
I built 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.
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.