Divij Sinha I'm a PhD student in Political Economy at the University of Chicago, and a data scientist and policy analyst, broadly interested in India and the Global South.

I am also a Research Engineer at the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago, and was previously an Adjunct Instructor at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

I hold an MS in Computational Analysis and Public Policy from the University of Chicago (2024, Siebel Scholar), and a B.E. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from BITS Pilani, Goa with a minor in Politics, Economics, and Philosophy. Prior to Chicago, I was a Research Associate at the Urban Informatics Lab at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements.

Work

Research & Projects [github]

Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Lab

Election Survey Analysis
Metrics and analysis for large-scale US primary election surveys, piloting new voting methods and candidate slates with Prof. Moon Duchin at Cornell University (Summer 2024).

Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation

Cook County Property Tax
Spatial features for the Cook County Assessor's housing valuation model; automated property tax explainers and fairness assessment reports. [repo] [example 1] [example 2] [example 3]
Localised Segregation Study
Collaborated with Cornell University on a project using cell-phone pings to study localised segregation patterns.

Center for Spatial Data Science

Chicago Neighborhood Project
Web mapping tool for survey data collection on Chicago neighborhood boundaries. [survey website] [COSIT 2024 paper] [WBEZ Reset] [Block Club Chicago]

Indian Institute for Human Settlements

Urban Informal Sector Policy Study
Report for the Chief Minister's Rajasthan Economic Transformation Advisory Council, Government of Rajasthan. [PDF]
Karnataka Child Health Analysis
Analysis of discrepancies in child health indicators across Karnataka. [webinar] [press release]
Demographic Research
National district-to-district migration estimates; population projections to 2051 using Bayesian hierarchical models; confidential COVID-19 district risk analysis for the Government of India (2020).

Local Data Journalism

Ran the Mansueto Institute's Local Data Journalism Fellowship (2024–2026), leading teams of research assistants on urban-focused data journalism collaborations with Chicago newsrooms.

Extracted and standardised hospital pricing data across the Chicago metro area (208M+ rows), supporting analysis of price variation across hospitals and insurers.

[Sun-Times story] [WBEZ segment] [site]

Built a property ownership tool that uncovers networks of LLC landlords behind the city's rental housing, matching parcels and entities by common addresses and names.

[Sun-Times story] [WBEZ story] [site]

Dashboard tracking daily CTA bus metrics from ChiHackNight's Ghost Buses dataset.

[Tribune story] [site] [repo]

Dashboard auditing how Chicago allocated and spent its American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) federal relief funds.

[site]

Interactive explainer that breaks down Cook County property tax bills for any address or PIN and compares changes across assessment years.

[Illinois Answers story] [site]

Publications

ILO/IIHS — Domestic Labour Studies (2023)
Three publications on paid and unpaid domestic work in urban India. [Reproducing a Household] [Deficits in Decent Work] [Employer Practices]
IBPSA/FARU — Thermal Comfort Research (2022)
Two papers on predicting operative temperature and adaptive thermal comfort controls using machine learning. [BSO 2022] [FARU 2022]

Teaching

University of Illinois, Chicago — Adjunct Instructor
PA 470, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the Public Sector (Spring 2025).
Harris School of Public Policy — Teaching Assistant (2022–2024)
Data and Programming for Public Policy; Mathematics for CS and Data Analysis; Software Engineering for Civic Tech.
IIHS — Urban Fellows Programme
Designed and delivered courses on data and public data sources for the Urban Fellows Programme and ad-hoc sessions for bureaucrats and policy professionals.

Selected student feedback

Personal

More at Github and Substack.

On Mandarins and Bandits
Oct 2026 — Reflections on development economics and political economy, and my place within them
Whose value is it anyways?
Apr 2025 — This is a piece on ML and AI that I wrote for a class in January 2024.
IPL Series : Part 1 - Teams, stadiums, and players
Apr 2025 — First in a series analysing cricket data from the Indian Premier League
Indian Place Name Generator [repo]
RNN-based web app to generate Indian place names, with customisable state origin and start strings.
Pokemon Xanthic
A C++ game built from scratch with friends in high school.
A Jet-Lag companion tracker [repo]
A simple digital tracker for Jet-Lag the game on Nebula.
Job Harvester [repo]
Scrape pre-defined job boards at scheduled frequency.

Contact

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 any way I can - from help with research to writing grad school applications, and preparing for CAT/GRE/BITSAT etc.

Mail - divijs@uchicago.edu
Github
LinkedIn
Substack