About Me

I am a PhD student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Human Development, Learning, and Teaching Concentration). I am a member of the Settings for Early Education and Development (SEED) Lab and the Measurement Lab at HGSE, as well as a graduate student affiliate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. My research focuses on early childhood development (ECD) measurement and intervention from an international perspective, with a particular emphasis on Majority World or low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

Before joining HGSE, I worked for UNICEF Nepal, where I contributed to the validation of national and international ECD assessment tools and the evaluation of ECD programs in collaboration with the Government of Nepal's Education Review Office. I hold a B.A. in International Development from the University of Tsukuba (Japan) and an M.A. in International Educational Development from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Click here for my CV.

My Research

I investigate children’s approaches to learning (AtL), including curiosity and executive functions, with a focus on understanding how various early educational experiences, such as child-centered, play-based practices versus didactic instruction, shape children’s developmental trajectories through a complex network of AtL processes. I am particularly interested in cultural and contextual variations in how developmental constructs like curiosity are expressed and interpreted within communities and what roles they play for their learning in everyday social dynamics, with the goal of identifying diverse, contextually grounded forms of effective AtL and their implications for improving early education interventions.

Previously, I conducted a qualitative study, An Emic Exploration of Epistemic Curiosity in Early Childhood in Nepal, which examined how epistemic curiosity manifests in children’s behaviors and how teachers and parents perceive these behaviors. Building on this work, I am currently leading a lab-in-the-field experiment titled From Curiosity to Learning in Classrooms in Nepal, which explores the causal effects of curiosity-driven information-seeking behaviors on learning outcomes. Drawing on the expanded behavioral operationalization of curiosity identified in my earlier qualitative research, this study leverages exogenous variation in curiosity behaviors induced by randomized instructional treatments to investigate curiosity’s roles in learning in a causally robust and contextually relevant way. My broader aim is to inform the design and optimization of child-centered, play-based educational interventions that can lead to more effective and sustainable improvements in children's learning across LMICs.

As a research assistant at the SEED Lab, I am involved in the following research work:

• Cross-national ECD measurement projects such as the Caregiver Reported Early Development Instruments (CREDI) and the WHO’s Global Scales of Early Development (GSED).

• The impact evaluation of a remote intervention using digital technology, Afinidata, which examines its effects on children’s and parents’ outcomes among low-income families in Brazil.

• A meta-analysis of social-emotional learning (SEL) interventions in LMICs.

Additionally, I work as a consultant for RTI International, analyzing trajectories of SEL outcomes using data from the LEGO Play Accelerator projects across five LMICs, and for Rocket Learning (a non-profit organization in India), supporting impact evaluation of a digital parenting intervention.