Anjali Adukia is a visiting faculty member at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the founder and director of the MiiE Lab (Messages, Identity, and Inclusion in Education). Her research asks how children from all backgrounds can have the opportunity to realize their potential. She studies the origins, dimensions, and persistence of inequality: why disparities in opportunity and outcomes arise, how they become embedded in institutions and in the categories societies construct, and how policy can either widen or narrow them. She pursues these questions across several arenas: the social categories that structure life chances, the neighborhoods and cities that govern access to opportunity, and the institutions -- schools chief among them -- that transmit advantage and disadvantage across generations.

A central obstacle to this work is measurement: inequality can only be studied where it can be measured. Adukia's work therefore advances on two fronts. Substantively, she documents how inequality is constructed, spatially allocated, and institutionally reproduced, and she evaluates the policies designed to address it. Methodologically, she combines applied microeconomics with tools from computer science -- including artificial intelligence methods that convert high-dimensional objects such as images and text into analyzable data -- to render measurable the forms of inequality that have been effectively invisible. Her research draws on large-scale data, often derived from previously unused or underused sources, expanding the analytical toolkit available to social scientists.

Adukia has received an NSF CAREER Award in economics (2024-2029), the SREE Early Career Award (2023), the William T. Grant Foundation Scholar Award (2018-2023), the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship (2018), and an Institute of Education Sciences grant (2020-2022).  Her doctoral thesis won best dissertation awards from APPAM and AEFP. Her research has received awards from Google and has been featured in media outlets such as Scientific American, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Education Week, School Library Journal, and NPR.

Adukia is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the Economics of Education and Children and Families groups, a research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development, an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), an affiliate of the CESifo Research Network, and a faculty affiliate of the University of Chicago Education Lab.  She is on the editorial boards of Education Finance and Policy, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, and Journal of Social Computing (IEEE).  She organizes the annual AI in Social Sciences conference at The University of Chicago. She completed her doctoral degree at Harvard University, with a focus on the economics of education. She has a masters of education from Harvard University and a bachelor of science degree in molecular and integrative physiology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  She was formerly a board member of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network – San Francisco Bay Area. She continues to work with non-governmental organizations internationally, such as UNICEF and Manav Sadhna in Gujarat, India.

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