Shamayla Durrin Islam joined the Department of Economics and the Forward Society Lab’s predoctoral 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.