About Me

The Researcher

I am a doctoral candidate at the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Boston College. I did not arrive at social psychology directly. I started with history and philosophy at the University of Delhi, where I became increasingly drawn to understanding how the world came to look the way it does. While history taught me that change is rarely clean, philosophy taught me to sit with questions longer than is comfortable.

But what actually shpaes people's everyday lives in the present? Wrestling with this question, led me to public adminsitration for my masters. At the time, the answer seemed simple, it was systems that defined our lives - policies, institutions, bureaucracies, and the people who built these systems, often without asking the people who had to live inside them.

Yet something was missing. History reminded me that people do not just absorb systems. They push back, find workarounds, organize, resist, resulting in social change. That gap between what a policy expects and what a person actually does became a question I could not unsee. Understanding it required going deeper into human behavior, which led me to environmental psychology during my M.Phil. in developmental studies.

This path brought me to Boston College, where I am now a Ph.D. candidate in the Social Influence and Social Change Lab, directed by Dr. Gregg Sparkman, and a Doctoral Fellow at The Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy. Before this, I worked across India — with solar energy non-profits, science institutions, and government bodies — each of which sharpened my conviction that research questions must remain grounded in lived realities.