Rushil Vashee earned a B.S., summa cum laude, in international political economy from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service in 2025. He was awarded the Dean’s Medal for earning the highest cumulative GPA in the school. As a part of his senior thesis, awarded departmental honors, Rushil created an original database on international lending to analyze why some countries rejected international assistance during COVID-19.
During his time at Georgetown, Rushil held multiple internships, including at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, the Edunomics Lab, and Howard University’s Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center. Rushil also spent a semester in Ecuador at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, where he was a research assistant in the Laboratory of Computational and Experimental Economics. Rushil’s time in Ecuador, shaped by conversations with his host family, classmates, and locals, deepened his curiosity about how social dynamics shape access to opportunity in urban economies.
Beyond academic and policy work, Rushil is an experienced journalist. He has published over 100 articles about the National Football League for USA TODAY Sports. A holder of a journalism minor from Georgetown University, Rushil spent his capstone semester interviewing NFL players and agents to examine the post-career narratives of professional athletes. He has also served as a senior coordinator of Georgetown Rangila, the largest charity dance showcase in the United States, with over 400 participants every year. As coordinator, he helped raise a record sum of $86,000 for a Nepali nonprofit to sponsor 300 years of girls’ education and to renovate a science lab and a school library. For his leadership skills, Rushil received the Martha Swanson Outstanding Senior Leader Award at Georgetown University.
Rushil’s Fulbright-Nehru research project investigates the determinants of digital financial inclusion in India. Using nationally representative survey data, Rushil constructs indices of digital skills and digital usage to model how individuals progress through a sequential adoption pathway from basic device access to active UPI-based payments. His analysis identifies where and for whom the largest gaps in economic access emerge, with particular attention to disparities by gender, urban-rural location, and social group. Combined with fieldwork across the country, Rushil aims to produce actionable insights on the behavioral and structural factors that shape who participates in India’s digital economy and what it will take to bring the next wave of users into the fold.