Nara Sritharan is a 2023 Templeton Fellow in the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) and a Postdoctoral Fellow at AidData – a research lab at the Global Research Institute at William & Mary – where she conducts quantitative analyses of a number of development topics. Her primary research interests are foreign aid, the nexus between geospatial and economic analysis, China’s impact in the Global South, and conflict.
Prior to joining FPRI and AidData, Nara completed her PhD in Economics at UMass Amherst. Her dissertation was on the political economy of peace and conflict, in particular peacebuilding and ethnic reconciliation in conflict/post-conflict countries. Nara is a Steering Committee member and Co-Founder of Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ), and maintains affiliations with Security in Context and Human Security Lab.