Sristi Halder
Sristi Halder is a rising senior at Beloit College in Wisconsin, where she’s double majoring in Data Science and Quantitative Economics with a minor in Mathematics. Originally from Dhaka, Bangladesh, Sristi is deeply interested in how data and economics intersect to address real-world challenges, especially in healthcare and public policy. She is excited to join the 2025 SUMR program to deepen her research experience and contribute to projects that aim to improve healthcare access and equity.
At Beloit, Halder has taken every opportunity to put her skills into action. She works as a Research Analyst for the college’s Institutional Research Office and for Belmark Associates, where she uses tools like Stata and Tableau to analyze trends in enrollment, graduation, and regional economic development. Her recent internship at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services allowed her to apply performance improvement frameworks to public health systems. As a Summer Fellow at the Becker Friedman Institute, she had the opportunity to work closely with faculty and peers on projects examining economic inequality and macroeconomic policy, gaining hands-on research experience and exposure to real-world applications of economic theory.
As a 2025 SUMR Scholar, Halder will contribute to two impactful health economics projects at the Wharton School under the mentorship of Dr. Atul Gupta and Aidan Crowley. The first project examines how medical student debt affects career decisions; specifically, students’ choice of clinical specialty, length of training, and whether they practice in nonprofit or for-profit settings. Using difference-in-differences methods, the study aims to evaluate the effects of a federal loan forgiveness program and understand whether financial relief actually shifts students toward lower-paying but high-need fields like primary care. The second project explores the growing trend of unionization among medical trainees and its potential consequences for patient outcomes, physician labor supply, hospital finances, and healthcare access. She will assist with data linkage, manual collection of unionization dates, literature reviews, and organizing datasets to support causal analysis. She’s especially excited to bring her data science and econometrics skills to research that tackles timely, high-stakes questions in healthcare policy.