Mrignyani Sehgal, PhD

Get to know Mrignyani:
Mrignyani joined PHIL in October 2026 as Lead Research Scientist and leads PHIL’s Research and Evaluation portfolio. She is a mixed-methods researcher who designs impact evaluations and monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) systems. She also builds the data infrastructure those evaluations run on, including survey systems and dashboards that decision-makers use to track programs while they are being delivered. She works with community partners, health systems, and public agencies to produce reports, briefs, and presentations written for each audience. Outside of her professional work, Mrignyani enjoys hiking and camping, photography, and writing essays.

Experience:
Mrignyani brings more than seven years of research and evaluation experience in academic and nonprofit public health across Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the United States, with work funded by the Gates Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and Bloomberg Philanthropies. She holds a PhD in Applied Economics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where her dissertation examined the intersection of agriculture, climate change, and nutrition.

During her doctoral studies, she also advised the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene on measuring disparities in exposure to food marketing. Before her PhD, Mrignyani worked as a research analyst in the Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), where she designed and conducted a randomized controlled trial testing behavior change communication strategies in women’s self-help groups in India and evaluated a large-scale agriculture and nutrition intervention examining maternal and child health outcomes. Most recently, as a Senior Research Associate at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she studied how food labeling policies affect population health. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including Food Policy and BMJ Global Health.

Expertise:
Impact Evaluation and Causal Inference; Mixed-Methods Research; Randomized Controlled Trials; Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Systems; Survey Design and Data Infrastructure; Dashboards and Data Visualization

Languages:
English, Hindi