Havisha Khurana is a doctoral candidate in the Quantitative Research Methods in Education (QRME) program at the University of Oregon. Drawing from her time as an educator in a low-income school through the Teach for India fellowship, her research examines the impact of education policies on the experiences of historically underserved student populations, including students with disabilities and multilingual learners, using advanced quantitative methods. An expert in R and Stata statistical software, she has extensively worked with large-scale administrative data and provided analytical support to several research teams. Havisha has worked on projects related to reading outcomes, school discipline, reclassification policies and program models for students classified as English Learners, mentoring programs for first-generation college students, and technical adequacy of Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), a widely used literacy screener in the United States.  

Havisha has received numerous awards, scholarships, and fellowships from the University of Oregon. She has completed several specialized trainings, including a Certificate in Education Finance from the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. Additionally, Havisha has disseminated her work through presentations at several national-level conferences and has drafted technical reports, policy reports, and journal articles. Her dissertation evaluates three educational policies that promise “an equal educational opportunity” for students with disabilities and students in English Learner (EL) programs in the United States and India. Havisha holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, and a master’s degree in Economics from the University of Oregon.