PRANAY VARADA

A website to improve geographic awareness by empowering anyone to learn about the world from anywhere in the world. I worked on this project with eight fellow National Geographic Bee alumni, mainly from 2019 to 2021. In addition to the website, we hosted two international virtual geography competitions, the videos of which you can watch at our YouTube channel here.

reRoot aims to help members of underserved communities obtain accessible information and make more informed migration decisions, beyond existing networks and word-of-mouth. I worked on this project with four graduate students affiliated with American and Canadian universities, and together we finished as finalists in the 2022 MIT Social Innovation Challenge.

While serving as a Civic Digital Fellow at the Internal Revenue Service in summer 2022, I worked on a project using a customized version of Google's BERT language model to classify IRS.gov webpages. This presentation highlights our group's work during the internship.

As a member of the Harvard Undergraduate Foreign Policy Initiative in fall 2021, I formulated policy recommendations for the U.S. Africa Command with respect to navigating China's soft power tactics and messaging in Africa.

After winning the 2017 National Geographic Bee, I published a series of seven books based on the notes I took in preparation for the competition. To date, nearly 2,000 copies have been sold.

Created as a final project for Harvard's CS50 in 2021. Our group developed a basic website that links each country in the world to a unique and relevant article concerning that country.