Karthik Muralidharan

Karthik Muralidharan is a Principal Investigator on the RISE India team, an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego, and Co-Chair of Education Research at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is considered one of the world’s leading scholars on education in developing countries, especially in India. He has an exceptional track record of conducting rigorous randomized evaluations at scale while working closely with governments. He has authored highly cited studies on governance in Indian schools. In Andhra Pradesh, he has conducted large-scale experimental evaluations of a range of education policies, including performance pay, block grants, diagnostic feedback and private school vouchers. As an academic scholar, he invests time and effort in communicating and disseminating research results to broader audiences in nontechnical language. He has given over 120 invited lectures and seminars in over 15 countries in the past decade, and has written influential policy-oriented documents including the approach paper on primary education for India’s 12th Five-Year Plan. His primary research interests include development, public, and labor economics. Born and raised in India, he earned an AB in Economics (summa cum laude) from Harvard, an MPhil in Economics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in Economics from Harvard.