Karra Named 2018 Hariri Junior Faculty Fellow

Mahesh Karra, Associate Director of the Global Development Policy Center’s Human Capital Initiative (HCI) and Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, has been announced as a Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing 2018 Junior Faculty Fellow.

The Hariri Institute Junior Faculty Fellows program was established in 2011 both to recognize outstanding junior faculty at Boston University working in diverse areas of computational data-driven sciences, as well as to provide focal points for supporting broader collaborative research in these areas at BU and beyond. Junior Fellows are selected by the Hariri Institute Steering Committee based on nominations received each spring, and are appointed for a three-year term.

Dr. Karra joins fellow Human Capital Initiative (HCI) core faculty members in this honor. Dr. Samuel Bazzi has been a junior faculty fellow since 2014 and Dr. Jacob Bor since 2016. 

Kevin Gallagher, director of the Global Development Policy Center, said:

The GDP Center is proud that Mahesh Karra has been selected as a Junior Faculty Fellow. Dr. Karra blends development economics, public health, and big data in pursuit of policy-oriented results that make the world a better place. In addition to being a blossoming assistant professor at the Pardee School, he is also an associate director at the GDP Center’s Human Capital Initiative, which will benefit greatly from the fellowship.

The Institute’s Junior Faculty Fellows demonstrate the benefits achieved in making the leap from quantitative, statistically-driven research to computational, algorithmically-driven research, and the program’s success is a tell-tale sign of the increasing importance of the Institute’s mission of bringing the computational lens to bear on our data-driven world.

Karra’s academic and research interests are broadly in development economics, health economics, quantitative methods, and applied demography. His research utilizes experimental and non-experimental methods to investigate the relationships between population, health, and economic development in low- and middle-income countries.