Nidhi Kalra

Nidhi Kalra, Senior Technology Policy Adviser for U.S. Senator Kamala D. Harris

Nidhi Kalra is the senior technology policy adviser to Senator Kamala D. Harris.

Prior to joining Senator Harris’s team, Nidhi was a senior information scientist at the RAND Corporation, director of RAND’s San Francisco Bay Area office, and co-director of RAND’s Center for Decision Making Under Uncertainty. Her research focused on autonomous vehicle policy, climate change adaptation, and tools and methods that help people and organizations make better decisions amid deep uncertainty. She spearheaded RAND’s autonomous vehicle policy work. Nidhi is the lead author of the study “Driving to Safety: How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability? (2016)” and co-author of the flagship report “Autonomous Vehicle Technology: A Guide for Policymakers (2016).” She has over ten years of experience in autonomous vehicle policy and is committed to using her expertise to further evidence-based policy making. She has testified on autonomous vehicle policy at three congressional hearings and was a member of the California Road Charge Technical Advisory Committee, which provides guidance to the State legislature on road use charge alternatives to the gas tax.

Nidhi also helps organizations improve how they make robust decisions, particularly in the face of climate change, which she views as the most urgent problem of our time. She led a project to ensure long-term water security in Lima, Peru and is helping the State of California make long-term investments in the Sacramento-San Juaquin Delta. In 2013, she served as a senior decision scientist in the Office of the Chief Economist of Sustainable Development at the World Bank, where she helped launch the World Bank’s portfolio in robust decision making.

Nidhi received her Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.

A Letter from the United States Senator Kamala D. Harris of the State of California