On July 1st, the Faculty of Social Sciences welcomed Rubina Hundal, who joins the Department of Economics and Wilson College as an assistant professor.
We caught up with Hundal to talk about her academic and professional journey, her main research interests, what excites her about this position and what she does outside of work.
Tell us about your academic and professional journey so far.
I have had a fairly non-linear path into economics. I grew up in India and always leaned toward math, so I did what most math enthusiasts around me did and studied computer engineering and finance in college. I was also deeply drawn to public service, and during that time, I co-founded a nonprofit that worked to close immunization gaps for infants in rural areas. After graduating, I moved into investment banking, but that early exposure to inequality, crumbling local institutions, and the difficulty of actually implementing policy kept gnawing at me. It eventually pulled me toward Carnegie Mellon University, where I trained in data analytics and public policy. Working as a research assistant to Professor Alfred Blumstein there, I fell in love with research, and watching how he invested in his students made me want to be that kind of mentor myself one day. Following that, I joined the World Bank in Washington DC, where I was with the Development Impact Evaluation (DIME) and Development Research Group teams, using fieldwork and econometric tools to suggest evidence-based policy to countries. I completed my PhD at the University of Chicago this summer, where I led several large-scale randomized controlled trials, and I am excited to grow as an academic at McMaster now.
What excites you most about joining the Department of Economics and Wilson College?
The colleagues at the Department of Economics are some of the most productive yet warmest people I have encountered in the field, and I am excited to learn from them and work alongside them. I was also genuinely inspired by Wilson College’s mission and the team it is building, alongside a spectacular student body. My own philosophy centers on working directly with communities, and I think that approach will be nurtured well here. I am looking forward to growing the work in applied microeconomics and behavioral experiments at the department and finding new collaborations across both spaces.
What role does Wilson College play in training the next generation of leaders?
What I find most compelling about Wilson College is that it does not treat leadership as something students will grow into someday, in some distant future. Its emphasis on community action is pushing students to practice leadership right now, in their neighborhoods, their research, and their civic life on campus. Instead of preparing ‘future leaders’ in the abstract, Wilson College is producing leaders in the present tense, students who are already thinking through solutions to real societal challenges rather than waiting for a diploma to grant them permission to lead. That shift, from someday to now, is exactly the kind of applied, community-facing work I care about as an economist. I am excited to help students turn evidence and inquiry into action, while learning from their passion and energy along the way.
What are your main research interests?
As an applied microeconomist, I work at the intersection of development, labour, and behavioral economics. Broadly, I study how inequality restricts access to opportunity and shapes household decisions, and I evaluate interventions that improve mobility in low-income contexts. It still astounds me how different the lives of two people living two houses apart can be, and most of my work traces where that inequality comes from, especially for women and young girls, and how it limits access to education and labour markets. I have chased this question from some fairly different angles: how a fixable trait like oral health quietly costs people jobs in urban India, how a school-based internship program shifts the way girls (and their parents) think about work, and how gender shapes risk-taking in investing. I am also starting to dig into how women who migrate from Punjab to Canada for education end up reshaping marriage-market norms around caste, dowry, and status back home. Mostly, I rely on randomized controlled trials, lab-in-the-field, and field experiments to test what actually moves the needle.
Outside of academia, what do you like to do?
As a military kid and recovering nomad, I have attended over ten schools, and Dundas is officially move number thirty-one! Home for me has always been people rather than a place, so in every spare moment, I like hopping onto a flight to see family and friends scattered across the world. I also like to stress-bake (and then guilt-lift!), so I am looking forward to sharing the calories, minus the stress, with new colleagues. I am also finding my way back to Kriya Yoga, which is a meditative breathing practice, and I greatly look forward to exploring the many waterfalls and lush spots near campus to practice it.
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