Mandana Vakil

Mandana Vakil is a Graduate Student Researcher at CPL and a PhD student in Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. At CPL, she is working on projects concerning education and access to the social safety net.

Mandana’s research interests are centered on understanding the policy levers that can reduce disparities and improve opportunities for families. She is specifically interested in measuring the effectiveness and take-up of government programs and the impacts that they have on socioeconomic well-being.

Prior to arriving at UC Berkeley, Mandana was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Comprehensive Income Dataset (CID) Project with Professor Bruce Meyer at the University of Chicago. There, she worked on a range of topics including measuring the duration of spells of housing benefit receipt and estimating the full income distribution of the population in the United States.

Mandana holds a BA in Economics and Public Policy from Brown University and an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Outside of work, she enjoys playing tennis, taking photos, spending hours on weekends baking bread, or frequenting new bakeries in search of the perfect ham & cheese croissant.