About me
I'm a data scientist and policy analyst, starting a PhD in Political Economy at the University of Chicago in
Fall 2025.
I am currently a Research Engineer at the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, at the University of Chicago,
and an adjunct lecturer at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
I graduated from the MS in Computational Analysis and Public Policy at the University of Chicago in 2024, and
prior to that I was at the Urban Informatics Lab at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements.
Throughout my career, I've been driven by the belief that technology, when thoughtfully applied, can be a
powerful tool for public good. My experiences have spanned across data science, policy analysis, and urban
informatics, each reinforcing my commitment to using data for societal improvement.
Projects
Most of these can be found at my Github
Fun
My thought on AI and alignment.
Scrape pre-defined job boards at scheduled frequency.
A simple digital tracker for Jet-Lag the game on Nebula, doing away with trying to remember all the
cards, rules, etc.
A simple web app to generate Indian place names using an RNN, wih customisable state origin, and start
strings. Built using Indian Census.
Work
- Created a web mapping based tool for survey data collection for the Chicago Neighborhood
Project
[survey website]
[WBEZ Reset episode]
[Block Club Chicago]
- Generated Property Tax fairness assessment reports studying Cook County with Prof. Chris Berry
at
the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation
- Worked with the Cook County Assessor's Office to generate spatial features used for the
assessment
model to better predict housing valuations
- Worked with the Cook County Assessor's Office to create automated property tax explainers for
Cook
County
[repo]
[example 1]
[example 2]
[example 3]
-
"Reproducing a Household: Recognising and Assessing Paid and Unpaid Domestic Work in
Urban India", ILO, IIHS, 2023
-
"Deficits in Decent Work: Employer Perspectives and Practices on the Quality of
Employment in Domestic Work in Urban India", ILO, IIHS, 2023
-
"Employer Practices and Perceptions on Paid Domestic Work: Recruitment, Employment
Relationships, and Social Protection", ILO, IIHS, 2023
-
Policy Study on managing the Urban Informal Sector", Non-public report for the Chief
Minister's
Rajasthan Economic Transformation Advisory Council, Government of Rajasthan
- An analysis of discrepancies in child health indicators across Karnataka [webinar recording]
[press release]
- Created national level estimates of district-to-district in-migration and out-migration to
bridge
data availability and quality gaps in publicly available datasets to further organisation wide
understanding of migration parameters
- Predicted future fertility rates, mortality rates, and migration numbers to 2051 for 5-year
projection intervals employing Bayesian hierarchical models; then applied outputs to age-sex
cohorts
to generate population pyramids every 5 years
- Produced a confidential district level risk analysis report for the Govt of India in March 2020
for
the COVID-19 pandemic exploring the spread potential, the impacts and the response capacity
- Wrote the section on migration for a policy brief for the XV Finance Commission of India on
Urban
Infrastructure and Resilience
- Developed a Shiny app (R) dashboard to explore domestic migration patterns across education,
reason
of movement, gender etc. built from national datasets such as the Census of India, 2011
-
Currently teaching PA 470, ML and AI for Public Policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
- Designed, prepared content for, and taught sessions focusing on understanding Indian public
data
and other data skills in the Data Skill Lab as a faculty member of the Urban Fellows Programme
at
the Indian Institude for Human Settlements
Feel free to reach out if you want to chat about anything! Especially if you are from an underrepresented
minority from India/South Asia, I would love to help out in way I can - from help with research to writing
grad school applications, and preparing for CAT/GRE/BITSAT etc.
Mail - divijs at uchicago dot edu
Github
LinkedIn
Substack