More About Me!

If you are a dreamer, come in
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin
Come in, come in

— Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

I love puzzles and people, and I'm primarily interested in using my time on our marble to improve the conditions of humans and animals today and beyond. This is a fairly high variance play, so suggestions always welcome.

I'm a lifelong Chicagoan and have been described as "aggressively midwestern." This has only intensified upon arriving on the East coast. I am also Jain and am quite involved in the US's diaspora community, having served two terms on the national Executive Board of the Young Jains of America, including as Midwest Regional Coordinator and Director of Events. Many of my philosophical intuitions come from this pacifist tradition.

I speak Gujarati and Hindi, and a fair bit of Spanish from years of practice and travel.

Some things I've done

  • Future of Life Foundation Fellow — AI for Human Reasoning.
  • Fulbright Grantee (India, 2021) — to study rural female labor force participation and the Indian farmer suicide crisis.
  • Cobbled the heels and soles of my favorite pair of boots, to which I was enormously attached. It was fun, but I know now that all things die.
  • Wrote the placard that was briefly displayed for Marcel Duchamp's Bottle Rack at the Art Institute of Chicago.
  • Ran the first international forecasting tournament between university groups.
  • Briefly worked on Pact with Eric Neyman and Shriyash Upadhyay, a donation-pairing platform aimed at taking money out of political arms races of campaign fundraising and into the hands of effective charities. I also wrote my undergraduate thesis on the analysis of such a platform, for which I won the Economics department's David S. Hu thesis award. We closed shop after realizing that political incumbents will fight quite hard to prevent this from happening.

In my free time, I like to box and read. I'm on a bit of a biography kick. If you have fun ideas and would like to chat, please feel free to reach out at avshah@mit.edu. I love a good email thread.