Shamayla Durrin Islam joined the Department of Economics and the Forward Society Lab’s pre-doctoral fellowship program in June 2025 to support faculty research on political economy, education and development economics. Shamayla graduated from the University of Toronto in 2025 with a BSc in Economics (Data Analytics), with minors in Statistics and Mathematics. Research interests include the political economy of democratic governance, empirical strategies for poverty reduction, and development economics in LMICs.