What drew you to study education?

My family is from Bangladesh, and education is a central tenet in our story. While my father was working for USAID in Bangladesh, he met a blind professor from Cornell who mentored him and encouraged him to apply for a master’s program. My father was accepted into Cornell and his mentor provided him with a scholarship from the Helen Keller Foundation. Education was a gateway for my parents to pursue better opportunities. Years later, my parents raised me and my two sisters in the U.S. to present us with the gift of education that they struggled to receive. I feel extremely fortunate to have parents who always prioritized our education and had the ability to move to the best school districts. However, many children around the world do not have this opportunity. What situation you are born into can dictate your life trajectory. I want to conduct research that shakes things up so children from all backgrounds can receive a solid educational foundation and have the necessary knowledge to create their own path of success despite challenging circumstances. 

What were you doing prior to applying to the GSE?

In college, I was involved in local and international community service related to education. I spent a summer volunteering at an orphanage in Bangladesh and learned how under-resourced they were and how corruption siphoned off the limited funds they had. Afterward, we fundraised to support a local non-governmental organization that supported girls’ education in a rural Bangladeshi village. I also joined a school organization to support education in rural Belize by helping them with construction projects. However, these experiences left me wondering what was really making a difference in improving education on a large scale. After college, I interned at the World Food Programme to learn about how they develop nutrition and agriculture programs to support impoverished families and children. I became disenchanted with how they were throwing money at so many different issues without thoroughly testing what was effective. Governments have limited resources and we need to better understand what they should fund. Research was the answer. I interned at Innovations for Poverty Action in Bangladesh, working on evaluating different ways to improve household sanitation practices, and subsequently led a follow-up survey examining the impacts of a secondary school scholarship on children’s long-term well-being in Ghana. Talking to children and understanding how the scholarship was impacting their lives fueled my interest in applying to graduate school to lead my own projects. 

Is there anyone who inspired you to pursue advanced study in education?

My father is my main mentor. He works at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and is extremely dedicated to agriculture research that alleviates poverty for rural households, especially in Bangladesh. Growing up, I used to read his policy briefs on Food for Education, a program in Bangladesh that provided food to kids in school to incentivize them to attend school. It was surprising to me, a kid who loved school and did not need to support my family’s income, that some families could not send their children to school because they needed to work at home. Talking to my dad planted the seed to learn more about policies that expand access to quality education for more children. 

What research are you pursuing at Stanford? What is your dissertation work or plans?

Interdisciplinary research is key. I am integrating psychology with economics to understand how parents, home environments, and classroom processes shape children’s learning. For example, there is a lot of evidence that preschool is beneficial, but those effects fade out over time, typically by third grade. The school and family beyond preschool plays a pivotal role in sustaining the effects of preschool. How can policies support schools and families most effectively to continue supporting children’s learning? I also want to push beyond looking at academic outcomes as the only metrics of successful education policies. My current research project will develop culturally relevant measures of learning in understudied contexts, such as rural Bangladesh. I draw from existing psychological constructs, such as executive function and self-regulation, to understand how they are applied by children in Bangladesh during learning at home and at school.