Tara Slough is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at New York University.

Tara writes on the political economy of institutions and development. Her current research focuses on the comparative study of bureaucracies and on research design. She has conducted fieldwork in Argentina, Colombia, Haiti, Malawi, Nigeria, Peru, and Venezuela.

Tara’s research has been supported by grants from the NSF, USAID, EGAP/DFID, J-PAL, the Columbia Institute for Latin American Studies (ILAS), the Center for the Study of Development Strategies (CSDS), and the Columbia Department of Political Science.

Tara recently earned her PhD from Columbia University. In her final two years of graduate school, she was a predoctoral fellow at Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) at the University of California, Berkeley. Before graduate school, she was a professional violinist. She earned both a BM in Violin Performance and a BA in Political Science from Rice University.