Speakers

Tanvi Shinkre is a PhD student in Statistics at UCLA, working on research in causal inference with Prof. Chad Hazlett. Her research focuses on methods for causal effect estimation, specifically in settings with treatment effect heterogeneity and in settings where treatment is not effectively implemented. Her applied projects focus on public policy settings in public health and sociology -- most recently, this has included multiple projects that examine effects of state policies on firearm-related deaths in the US. In collaboration with Prof. James Macinko, she is working on estimating causal effects of background check laws and stand your ground laws on firearm-related deaths, with the goal of creating a causal framework for understanding which types of policies can be proven to work in reducing firearm-related deaths. She has also collaborated with the gun policy team at RAND as part of the 2025 Summer Associate Program. In this position, she worked on assessing the accuracy of different specifications of fixed effects models in estimating firearm policy effects in the presence of treatment effect heterogeneity.