Arpita Wadhwa is a Research Fellow at the Center for International Development. She works with Professors Asim Khwaja and Ebehi Iyoha on AI Adoption in Africa, examining patterns within the continent's labor markets.
Arpita completed her Master's in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. During her time at Harvard, she worked as a Student Research Scholar with CID and served as a Visiting Scholar at Microsoft Research, where she led a field study on AI chatbot adoption among frontline health workers in India, producing one of the few empirical datasets on human-AI trust dynamics outside WEIRD populations. The research was presented at the IndiaAI Summit 2026, and the related first-authored paper is forthcoming in MobileHCI.
Before Harvard, Arpita spent three years at J-PAL South Asia, where she led research and data operations across government health and social protection programs in India.