Parnika is University of Chicago’s Applied Data Fellow working with The Fund in the Program and Investments vertical. Her work at The Fund focuses on learning from the “disruptions” caused by the pandemic to public schools in Chicago. She just graduated with her Masters of Arts from the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago, where her work focused on democratic institutions, investigating through separate research, the role of news media, contemporary policing, and social movements. Prior to UChicago, she was at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, where she worked on the politics of Middle East and North Africa, looking at the civil war in Yemen. Following her graduate degree in Economics, she worked as a data analyst. She has previously worked as a high-school teacher of Mathematics and Economics in India.
Parnika believes that it is important to be conscious of the human lives behind the data to ensure policy recommendations do not reduce human lives and experiences to numbers only. She grew up in India and is an ardent wanderer, gardener, history and trivia buff, all of which make their way to her blog: Maverick Feet.