I am a Post Doctoral Fellow at the Polarization and Social Change Lab (PASCL) at Stanford University directed by Dr. Robb Willer. I got my PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, where I worked with Dr. Bill Swann and Dr. Jamie Pennebaker.

​I am interested in understanding (i) what it means for people to develop deep connections with groups (and ideologies), and (ii) how people who are deeply connected with groups deal with threats to their identities.  My work takes a multi-method approach in pursuing these questions, complementing traditional social psychology methods with big data and language analysis methods, which allows me to study these processes in both controlled and natural settings.

I am currently co-leading The Pandemic Project, which attempts to track the social psychological impacts of the current COVID outbreak. Check out our reports of our latest research findings here. I am also part of the team that built the newly launched text analysis program, LIWC-22. Check it out and send us your feedback!

​Before discovering the world of social psychology and research, I was a developer at Microsoft and a Young India Fellow.
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Email me at ashwinia@stanford.edu to say hello! I'd love to chat about research/academia/grad school/anything!