Bio: Suraj is a PhD Student at the School of Information, UC Berkeley. He holds a Berkeley Graduate Fellowship. Prior to pursuing his PhD, Suraj advised researchers and policymakers in India on the design and implementation of policy evaluations. He holds an MA in Development Studies from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. In his spare time, he enjoys playing soccer (GGMU!), running, and cooking.
Research: Suraj’s research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and development economics, with a focus on the use of large, granular datasets to study human behavior. His current projects involve assessing the welfare impacts of digital credit in Nigeria, examining the role of poppy cultivation in mediating conflict and migration in Afghanistan, and quantifying the effects of exogenous income shocks on social network structure in Togo
Fields of Interest: Development Economics, Machine Learning, Remote Sensing, Social Networks
Website: surajrn.github.io
Recent Publications:
Instant Loans Can Lift Subjective Well-Being: A Randomized Evaluation of Digital Credit in Nigeria
Mapping Opium Poppy Cultivation in Afghanistan Using Satellite Imagery
4th ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS ’21), 2021.
Also accepted at the 27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD ’21), Workshop on Humanitarian Mapping.
