Rishi Ahuja portrait

Rishi N. Ahuja

2018-2019 Luce Scholar

Rishi Ahuja graduated from Berkeley in 2015 as a Regents’ and Chancellor’s Scholar where he double-majored in Economics and Political Science. He then completed a master’s degree in Economics at Trinity College Dublin as a George J. Mitchell Scholar. At school, he served as an elected official in the Berkeley student government and editor-in-chief of Trinity’s sole graduate research journal, and conducted field experiments measuring discrimination against same-sex couples on Airbnb to highlight the issue of fairness in technology. Rishi interned with U.S. and Irish regulators focusing on emerging issues in consumer financial protection, and upon graduation joined the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) as part of the Director’s Financial Analyst rotational program. He spent his first rotation helping build a digital platform for collecting mortgage data from across the country and is now conducting research on the agency’s over one million consumer complaints. His interest in Asia was sparked during a year-long project with the CFPB exploring the potential for alternative data to expand access to responsible credit internationally. As a Luce Scholar, Rishi hopes to explore the role of government and technology in transforming the ways in which underserved communities organize their financial lives.

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