ABOUT ME
I'm a federal program management and policy professional with over five years of experience supporting agencies across DHS, DoD, SBA, and the Department of Education. My work sits at the intersection of policy, data, and governance, helping complex government initiatives move from ambiguity to action.
I was born in New Jersey but grew up in India, which gave me an early, personal understanding of development and inequality. Ultimately this understanding drew me to Economics at Penn State, where I could examine how systems work and how they could be improved. A parallel major in English gave me honed my ability to communicate complex ideas with clarity and intention. It was during those undergraduate years that my passion for data analysis in research really took hold, shaped by development and labor economics coursework that showed me how rigorous analysis could inform real-world policy.
That interest moved from the classroom into practice at Optimal Solutions Group (OSG), a public policy and research firm where I worked as an analyst and project manager. One of the most formative projects involved partnering with the Small Business Administration to identify disparity ratios for women-owned small businesses in federal procurement, which contributed to a policy change resulting in a significant expansion of industries eligible for the Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) Federal Contracting Program. I also served as project manager for a multi-million-dollar contract with the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), managing project plans, budgets, staffing, and client coordination across a complex research initiative.
My time at OSG was formative, but it also revealed that much of the data collection and quality assurance was still manual, which introduced inefficiencies and inaccuracies. That observation pushed me toward JDSAT, an operations research and data sciences company, where I served as a data analyst and scrum master supporting the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. There I immersed myself in automation, validation, and the real-world power of big data, seeing firsthand how technology makes research methodologies more streamlined, and how essential it is to dynamic problem-solving in policy contexts.
Thus from undergraduate coursework to federal contracting to healthcare analytics, I was inspired to pursue a Master of Public Policy and Administration (MPPA) at Northwestern University, with a specialization in Data Analytics. The program offered exactly what I was looking for: a rigorous merging of research, data, and governance, with the flexibility to continue working full time. Northwestern sharpened both my technical skills and my thinking about public administration, ethics, and leadership, which have proved directly relevant to my work as a program manager and scrum master. Today, as an Integrated Master Scheduler and Program Risk Manager at Dynamo Technologies, I support defense acquisition programs for Army PM Biometrics, where I manage schedules, risk logs, and executive briefings while piloting the use of generative AI tools to improve program documentation and analysis.