Student Spotlight: Ravi B. Sojitra
September 25, 2020
Meet Ravi B. Sojitra
Incoming PhD student
HOMETOWN
New Jersey, USA
PLACE LIVED PRIOR TO STANFORD
Manhattan, New York
UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE INSTITUTION
Rutgers University—Newark
New York University
DEGREES AND MAJOR
BS in Biology and Philosophy
Masters in Applied Statistics for Social Science Research
Pre-MS&E experience
Before the PhD program, I was a Master's student in Applied Statistics for Social Science Research at NYU, a Computational Social Science Research Intern at Microsoft Research, and a Research Technician working on Explainable Artificial Intelligence at Rutgers University—Newark. I spend a lot of my professional life with social scientists, running experiments and conducting observational studies, because I am excited about substantive causal inference problems. However, during my internships at Microsoft Research, I learned how existing methods are poorly suited for questions and problems associated with systems we depend on today. I am pursuing a PhD to work on these issues and have fun doing it!
Desired post-MS&E impact
The research frontier in this area is enormous and growing, so to me it would be fulfilling to solve problems that hold people back from living the lives they want to live. Concretely, this would be through influencing policy decisions, designing new interventions, building new methods or tools, and improving social norms.
Interests and hobbies
It depends a lot on where I live, but I enjoy playing my guitars and taking walks pretty much anywhere! I do love beaches, so when they are easy to access, I visit often.