Ashna Devaprasad is a Qualitative Researcher at the Government Outcomes Lab, where she contributes to the evaluation of the Cabinet Office-led Test, Learn, and Grow (TLG) programme. In this role, she is keen to apply ideas from law and public administration, business, and human-centered design to better understand applications of “test-and learn” ways of working to policymaking and service delivery. Ashna is committed to integrating knowledge across disciplines and methodological traditions, and is especially interested in making research on “what works” genuinely useful to decision-makers in practice.
Before joining the GO Lab, Ashna worked as a consultant in London on several public policy evaluations, such as, for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Department for Education, What Works Centres, Violence Reduction Units, The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, and the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales. She has also collaborated on projects for the World Bank, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and various civil society and human rights organisations in Southeast Asia.
Recently, Ashna has been interested in two streams of work: 1) how using data science tools and specific artificial intelligence capabilities can help governments serve citizens better while promoting public trust; 2) how technologies can be developed and regulated with ‘safety by design’ principles in mind, to empower young people and safeguard them from bad actors.
Ashna trained as a lawyer in India, working mainly in dispute resolution and strategic litigation in public law and human rights cases. She has supported empirical research and pro bono death penalty litigation at Project 39A at the National Law University, Delhi (now The Square Clinic), where she helped build the first comprehensive database tracking changes in India’s death row population. She holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge.