Sherry Qinrui Miao

I've been really interested in doing research since undergrad school, when I realized that I can use economics to analyze social issues I'm interested in. For my thesis, I did research on the gender preference in education expenditure from families, assessing whether parents invest different amounts of money in boys' or girls' education. I've been interested in using research methods to measure and understand social equity, especially gender equity issues. After my undergraduate studies, I went to graduate programs at Harvard and then continued to work as a research fellow because I think this is pretty empowering - it enabled me to get deeper into the social issues I care about. My key responsibilities include working with large-scale data to see what kind of insights we can get, and translating those research results and insights to practitioners we collaborate with. For example, we research about how to improve community schools, and then we connect with school leaders to see if they can get something from our research results and make an impact at their local schools. My most notable professional achievement so far was doing a consulting project for Boston City Government on gender pay gap as my Master's thesis project, funded by the Mayor's Office of Women's Advancement. We gathered data, did interviews, and found out why women are still earning less money compared to men in Boston, then turned those insights into policy recommendations and presented the project to the city government. After this program, I probably will go for a PhD and continue using data and research methods to understand and make an impact on the social issues I care about. I'm thinking about going to think tanks or research institutes so I can use my expertise to make a larger impact.