{"id":5,"date":"2018-09-10T12:37:29","date_gmt":"2018-09-10T16:37:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/mvkarra\/faculty-model-website\/"},"modified":"2025-09-04T23:01:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T03:01:06","slug":"about_me","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/mvkarra\/about_me\/","title":{"rendered":"About Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/h3>\n

My Curriculum Vitae<\/a><\/span><\/h3>\n

In September 2025, I will be joining the\u00a0<\/span>Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>at Columbia University\u2019s Mailman School of Public Health as an Associate Professor of Population and Family Health.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am an <\/span>Associate Professor of Global Development Policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies<\/a> <\/span>at Boston University, the Associate Director of the Human Capital Initiative (HCI)<\/a><\/span>, and the Director of the Program on Women’s Empowerment Research (POWER)<\/a><\/span> at the Global Development Policy Center<\/a><\/span>. I was also an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of G\u00f6ttingen’s Center for Modern Indian Studies<\/a><\/span> from 2024-2025. My academic and research interests are broadly in development economics, health economics, quantitative methods, and applied demography. My research utilizes experimental and non-experimental methods to investigate the relationships between population, health, and economic development in low- and middle-income countries. I have conducted field work in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, and my current research uses randomized controlled trials to evaluate the health and economic effects of improving access to family planning and maternal and child health services in Malawi, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Tanzania. I have also worked for the Population Reference Bureau and the Futures Group International and served as a consultant to the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the Population Council. I am also a Co-Editor of Studies in Family Planning<\/a><\/span>, <\/em>a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes articles on public health, social science, and biomedical research on sexual and reproductive health, fertility, and family planning.<\/p>\n

I received a B.A. in Economics and Hispanic Studies (Joint Honours) from McGill University, an M.Sc. in Economics from the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, and an Sc.D. in Global Health Economics from Harvard University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My Curriculum Vitae In September 2025, I will be joining the\u00a0Heilbrunn Department of Population and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6036,"featured_media":446,"parent":0,"menu_order":7,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"bu-landing","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/mvkarra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/mvkarra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/mvkarra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/mvkarra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6036"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/mvkarra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":54,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/mvkarra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1399,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/mvkarra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5\/revisions\/1399"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/mvkarra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/mvkarra\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}