Uma Ilavarasan is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the government at Harvard University. She studies American and comparative politics, focusing on the distinction between “public” and “private” power. In particular, she is interested in how responsibility for the provision of infrastructure is distributed among different kinds of institutional actors, and when state procurement functions as a site of policymaking. Her dissertation analyzes the role that procurement plays in advancing cybersecurity policy in the United States and Germany.
Ilavarasan worked as a financial economist at the United States Treasury Department's Office of Tax Policy between her second and third years of graduate school.
