Sara Sadhwani

Sara Sadhwani is an assistant professor of politics at Pomona College and a commissioner on the 2020 California Citizens Redistricting commission. She is also the co-host of the Inside the Issues Podcast for Spectrum News 1.

Her research examines voting behavior, elections, voting rights, public opinion, and interest groups, with an emphasis on the representation of racial, ethnic, and immigrant communities and has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, Political Research Quarterly, and the Journal of Women, Politics and Policy.

She provides regular commentary and analysis of voting, elections, and both local and national politics which has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, TIME Magazine, CBS-Los Angeles, NPR Radio, The Guardian, and many others. In a voting rights case before the California Supreme Court, she is the lead author of a voting rights amicus brief which summarizes empirical research on the benefits of maximizing the voting strength of historical excluded communities.

Prof. Sadhwani earned her doctorate in political science from the University of Southern California, where her dissertation was supported by a fellowship from the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation. She is a faculty fellow at the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy and a senior researcher at AAPI Data. She was a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West and the recipient of the 2023 Emerging Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association’s Civic Engagement Section.

Prior to academia, Sara worked for nearly a decade advocating for the rights of immigrants at social justice organizations such as the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), Asian Americans Advancing Justice-LA, and the California Immigrant Policy Center.