LEADERSHIP

S.P. Harish is Assistant Professor at the Department of Government Science at College of William and Mary. He was previously a post-doctoral fellow in Global Governance at the Institute for the Study of International Development in McGill University. Harish has a PhD in Political Science from New York University, and a masters in International Relations from the Institute of Defense of Strategic Studies (now part of the S.Rajaratnam School of International Studies), Singapore.

He specializes in comparative politics with an emphasis on state capacity, energy access and political violence, especially in Southeast and South Asia. He has published in leading journals, including American Political Science Review, Science Advances, and Ecological Economics. His work has also been featured in popular outlets such as the Economist, The Atlantic, NY Mag, Marginal Revolution and Ideas for India.

At ISEP, Harish will be the Associate Director of the Behavioral Laboratory. He is responsible for the running of the behavioral laboratory of ISEP. He has experience in running field, lab-in-the-field, and behavioral experiments in India and Southeast Asia. These have included expanding electricity access using an off-grid solution; a vignette experiment on political corruption; and on the educational and social choices made by households in Thailand and Singapore. He has worked in both academic and think-tank environments, and aims to bridge research and policy initiatives through his work at ISEP.