Selected as a 2025 Bashir Ahmed Graduate Fellow

I am honored to have been selected as a 2025 awardee of the Bashir Ahmed Graduate Fellowship at UC Berkeley’s Department of Demography.

The Bashir Ahmed Graduate Fellowship supports dissertation research for students in the Demography PhD Program and the Sociology & Demography PhD Program. This fellowship provides critical support as I continue my dissertation research at the intersection of social demography, epidemiology, and computational methods.

My research examines how social networks correlate with mortality outcomes at the county level, investigates how partisan social networks can worsen disease outcomes, and studies the impact of loneliness on aging and health. Beyond traditional demographic research, I also apply large language models to demographic studies, developing techniques for text classification and computational analysis of survey data.

What makes this recognition particularly meaningful to me is that this year the fellowship was not application-based—the faculty independently selected the recipient. I am deeply grateful to the Department of Demography and the Ahmed family for this recognition and support. This fellowship will enable me to further develop my research on population health dynamics and continue bridging computational methods with demographic inquiry.

You can learn more about the fellowship and past recipients on the UC Berkeley Demography website.