Rate My Professor Ridhi Kashyap

Ridhi Kashyap is Professor of Demography and Computational Social Science in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, where she also serves as Director of Graduate Studies. She is a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College and is affiliated with the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, where she co-leads the strand on Digital and Computational Science. Her research spans multiple areas of demography, including mortality and population health, gender inequality, marriage and family, and migration and ethnicity. She has examined the demographic implications of son preference and studied the links between educational expansion, gender norms, and partnership patterns. Kashyap has also investigated the social and demographic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including cross-national mortality impacts and the role of trust in science.

A central focus of her work is digital and computational demography. She explores how computational methods such as agent-based models, microsimulation, and machine learning, along with digital trace data from web and social media platforms, can advance the study of population dynamics and social inequalities. Kashyap completed her DPhil in Sociology, jointly affiliated with the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. She was promoted to full Professor in 2022. Among her honors are the Philip Leverhulme Prize and the European Association for Population Studies Early Career Award. Kashyap teaches the Demographic Analysis course for the MPhil in Sociology and Demography.