Professor Dr. Ridhi Kashyap

Biography

Ridhi Kashyap is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, where she directs graduate studies. Her research spans areas of demography, focusing on questions linked to mortality, population health, gender inequality, marriage, family, migration, and ethnicity. She has studied demographic manifestations and implications of son preference, investigating how gender inequality interacts with demographic behaviours. Her areas of expertise include family demography, particularly the relationship between educational expansion and gender norms within marriage and partnership patterns in various contexts. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kashyap has worked on research examining the social and demographic impacts of the pandemic, including mortality effects from a cross-national perspective and the dynamics of information-seeking and trust in public health science. Her central research interest lies in leveraging computational approaches within demographic research, contributing to the growing field of Digital Computational Demography and fostering connections between demographic research and the computational social science community. She co-leads a strand in Digital Computational Science at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science. Methodologically, Kashyap is interested in computational methods such as agent-based models and microsimulation, and uses new data streams like digital trace data from the web to enhance the study of population dynamics and social inequalities.

Research Interests

Experience