Riya Sinha is a PhD candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Her research focuses on border management and regional economic connectivity in South Asia, combining fieldwork, policy analysis and data-driven methods to study cross-border infrastructure development, connectivity and regional cooperation.

She has held research positions at various leading think tanks and policy institutions. Most recently, she was an Associate Fellow in the Foreign Policy and Security Studies vertical at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), New Delhi (formerly Brookings India). She co-led the Sambandh Initiative on India’s regional connectivity and also led the development of the Sambandh Database and Map, a first-of-its-kind visualisation of India’s physical linkages with its neighbourhood.

In 2024, Riya was a Maitri Fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, supported by the Centre for Australia-India Relations. She was previously a Visiting Fellow (2022) at the Stimson Centre in Washington D.C. During the Fellowships, her research focussed on the role of external actors, such as the US and Australia, in infrastructure development in India’s neighbourhood. She is also an alumna of the Asian Forum on Global Governance (2022). Earlier in her career, Riya was a researcher at the Bureau of Research on Industry and Economic Fundamentals (BRIEF), where she conducted research on regional trade, logistics and supply chains, cross-Line of Control trade in Jammu and Kashmir, and time-release analyses at major Indian ports to advance ease of doing business reforms.