Chapin Hall

Arya Harison is a Researcher and Data Engineer at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. Harison works across multiple projects leading efforts to bring together multiple sources of information from child welfare and juvenile justice administrative data sources and other publicly available data sources such as Census data. She takes a lead role in designing, implementing, and managing complex codebases and technical infrastructure to convert, merge, and/or assemble large data sources to inform research projects, evaluations and policies geared toward improving the lives of children and families.

Prior to joining Chapin Hall, she garnered knowledge and interest in youth justice and child welfare policy through her experience with Children’s Policy and Law Initiative of Indiana where she worked as a Public Policy/Legal Intern. She researched and wrote policy position papers on issues such as lack of comprehensive student support services at school and raising the minimum age for juvenile detention in adult facilities. She also has four years of experience working in the Information Technology (IT) field where she acquired advanced IT knowledge and has a significant set of technical skills, including a deep knowledge of SQL database design and multiple programming languages such as Python, R, STATA etc.

Harison holds a Master of Public Affairs from Indiana University Bloomington as well as a Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology from University of Mumbai, India.