Ankita Panda is currently a first-year Master’s in Public Policy candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School. She holds a B.A. in Economics from Rutgers University. Originally from New Jersey, she is interested in gender policy, with a focus on issues of women’s economic empowerment and gender-based violence. Ankita has helped lead and co-author several gender-focused research projects and studies across the Kennedy School, the Harvard Business School, and MIT D-Lab. She has also previously lived and worked in Mumbai, where she provided capacity building support to help small- to mid-sized social enterprises scale their organizations and interventions. Outside of school, Ankita is an avid baker and Francophile. She speaks English and Oriya and is conversational in French.