Sangita Vyas
— Member — 1 min read
Research fellow
Sangita is a Research Fellow at rice, and her work focuses on child health in India. One area of her research focuses on the causes and consequences of poor air quality in India. Her working paper, “Child health impacts of coal: Evidence from India’s coal expansion,” finds that children born in an Indian village at a time when coal plant capacity is higher, are shorter than children born in the same village at a time when coal plant capacity is lower. Other work by Sangita and colleagues has shed light on an important cause of poor air quality in rural areas: the continued use of solid fuels despite increases in LPG ownership brought about by the Ujjwala Yojana. In a follow-up paper that is based on qualitative and quantitative interviews in rural north India, Sangita and coauthors discuss the ways in which patriarchal gender norms and attitudes encourage the use of solid fuels for cooking in the region.
Another area of Sangita's research investigates the causes and consequences of poor sanitation in rural India. She discusses the findings of this research in a widely-viewed TEDx talk.
Sangita is also a PhD student in the economics department at the University of Texas at Austin. She received an MPA from Princeton University, and a BS in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.