I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers university. Prior to that, I was the Michael Hammer Post-doc at the Institute for Data, Society and Systems at MIT. Prior to that I spent a year working with Prof. Robert West in the Data science lab at EPFL. I finished my PhD at Aalto University, Helsinki, under the supervision of Prof. Aris Gionis. My PhD thesis was on identifying and countering online polarization using algorithmic techniques. My broad research interests include Social Computing, Computational Social Science, Graphs, Data Mining, and Machine Learning.

Before starting my PhD, I worked at Yahoo Research and Qatar Computing Research Institute for a few years (more here). I completed my Masters and Bachelors in Computer Science from IIIT-Hyderabad.

Over the past few years, I've been trying to work on inter-disciplinary problems with applications in the global south. I've been fortunate enough to work on a wide range of topics, bring my expertise from computer science collaborating with sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, journalists and demographers (See publications). My work has been covered extensively in the international media.

My current research is focused on building innovative, opt-in, privacy preserving data-collection tools for platforms like WhatsApp, with the goal of developing interventions to stop/slow the spread of misinformation.

Looking for students!

I am looking for motivated students to work with for both short and long term positions. If you are interested in any of my research, please reach out to me.