Karra Named 2018 Hariri Institute Junior Faculty Fellow
Mahesh Karra, Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, has been announced as a Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing 2018 Junior Faculty Fellow.
The Hariri Institute Junior Faculty Fellows program was established in 2011 both to recognize outstanding junior faculty at Boston University working in diverse areas of computational data-driven sciences, as well as to provide focal points for supporting broader collaborative research in these areas at BU and beyond. Junior Fellows are selected by the Hariri Institute Steering Committee based on nominations received each spring, and are appointed for a three-year term.
Over the next academic year, each of the Junior Faculty Fellows will be giving a lecture at the Institute.
The Institute’s Junior Faculty Fellows demonstrate the benefits achieved in making the leap from quantitative, statistically-driven research to computational, algorithmically-driven research, and the program’s success is a tell-tale sign of the increasing importance of the Institute’s mission of bringing the computational lens to bear on our data-driven world.
Commenting on this eighth cohort of Junior Faculty Fellows, Professor of Computer Science and Hariri Institute Founding Director Azer Bestavros said he fully expects to see each fellow develop their research portfolios and grow their academic careers just as their predecessors were able to do.
“The Junior Faculty Fellows is the first program we started at the Hariri Institute,” Bestavros said. “Now, many of our Junior Faculty Fellows are full professors and very successful. They’re sitting on my steering committee, running labs of their own… It’s rewarding to see where our fellows have been and how far they’ve come.”
Karra’s academic and research interests are broadly in development economics, health economics, quantitative methods, and applied demography. His research utilizes experimental and non-experimental methods to investigate the relationships between population, health, and economic development in low- and middle-income countries.