Payal is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Demography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on social inequality and health in the Global South, with two main lines of inquiry. The first investigates the association between health outcomes and social disadvantage along lines of gender, caste, and religion. The second analyzes how dynamics of gender inequality shape the demographic measurement of fertility and mortality. She is trained in quantitative and demographic methods, and also use qualitative methods in her work.

In 2021, Payal’s co-authored paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, won PAA’s Dorothy S. Thomas Award for the best graduate student paper on the interrelationships among social, economic, and demographic variables. Her other research has been published in Demography, in Contraception, and in several other journals, including in Economic and Political Weekly, a leading journal of policy and social science in India.