Salma Shaheen

Salma Shaheen is an international student from Hebron, Palestine, who served as a Tobin RA for Professor Rohini Pande and ECG, 2020-21. Throughout her undergraduate studies, she was awarded several fellowships to research the effect of conflict-induced mobility restrictions on the gender gap in wages and schooling in Palestine. Her senior thesis, which estimates the effect of conflict on child labor in Palestine, is among the few economics essays nominated for a prize. Her analysis combines data sources on conflict-related violence (e.g. fatalities and prisoners) and conflict-infrastructure (e.g. checkpoints and the separation wall) to construct novel measures of an individual’s exposure to conflict intensity. Salma founded Yalies4Palestine to advocate for Palestinians’ rights under the Israeli occupation. She also served on Yale’s Advisory Committee on Accessibility Resources for which she was recently awarded Silliman’s Diversity and Inclusion Award.

Upon graduating in 2022 Salma entered the M.Phil program in Development Studies at University of Oxford as the recipient of the Henry Fellowship from Yale College. At Oxford, she hopes to focus her work on the gender differentials in the impact of conflict on child labor in Palestine.  

Silliman College Class of 2022 Major: Economics Favorite Quote:“My freedom: is to be what they don’t want me to be” - Mahmoud Darwish