Nazar Khalid

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Demography and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. I study how inequalities in education and health are produced and sustained in low- and middle-income countries, with a focus on children’s and women’s lives in India and South Asia. My work examines how disruptive events, especially climatic shocks, and large-scale development policies interact with entrenched hierarchies of caste, class, religion, and gender. I treat these disruptions and interventions as moments that reveal how social structures allocate exposure to harm, access to resources, and capacities for recovery. Across projects, I ask how these processes accumulate across the life course to generate durable gaps in schooling and health, and when they can instead shift trajectories toward more equal life chances.

My research combines population-representative longitudinal and cross-sectional surveys, high-resolution environmental data, and fieldwork in affected communities. I use demographic and statistical methods—including geospatial analysis, panel data techniques, and survey–satellite data linkage—alongside qualitative interviews and observations to study differential exposure, vulnerability, and access to opportunities, and to ground statistical patterns in lived experience.

I was awarded the University of Pennsylvania Inaugural Presidential Fellowship (2021–2024) and the Judith Rodin Fellowship (2020–2021). My research has been published in RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Economics of Education Review, World Development, PLOS ONE, Health Policy and Planning, and Economic and Political Weekly, among others.