Hi! I’m Karsen, a senior at Stanford pursuing a B.A. in economics, B.S. in math, and M.S. in computer science with a specialization in AI. I’m broadly interested in answering big questions in economics and policy, and I’m advised by Professors Pete Klenow and Nicholas Bloom.

Currently, I’m co-authoring a monetary policy paper with Dr. Kinda Hachem at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a game theory paper on ranked-choice voting with Professor Avidit Acharya. I also work with Professors Isaac Sorkin and Lihua Lei, and am a Teaching Assistant for introductory economics with Pete Klenow. On campus, I’m a Residential Assistant in the Public Service House, an Economics Peer Advisor, and a National Advisory Board Member for the Haas Center for Public Service.

In the past, I’ve worked for the public interest tech startup Propel, the US Treasury Department, End Poverty in California, U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley, Professor Joshua Rauh, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a federal aid agency. I founded and managed The Polling Place, a nonprofit with over 600,000 page views, that provides information on local candidates running for office; I now serve in an advisory role. I’ve taken graduate-level coursework in microeconomics, machine learning, market design, labor economics, natural language processing, graph theory, causal inference, convex optimization, and statistics/econometrics.

In my free time, you can catch me climbing mountains, taking road trips with friends, reading Substacks, and playing with my dog. Feel free to reach out at kwahal@stanford.edu!