Ilina Logani

About Ilina Logani

Born in Detroit, Michigan, and raised primarily in Spokane, Washington, Ilina Logani feels they are as much the child of two immigrants from New Delhi, India, as they are of the small South Asian community they call their own in the Inland Northwest. 

Growing up at the rural border of Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho, a region long shaped by the presence of white supremacist groups, Ilina first found a sense of belonging in the social movement histories they reached for as a teenager to understand their lived reality. Their coalition-focused advocacy has stretched from New York City—where they cofounded Frontiers of Justice, a course connecting Columbia University undergraduates with justice-oriented organizations in surrounding neighborhoods—to Spokane, where they have led grassroots initiatives providing needed affinity spaces for youth of color and queer youth.

Ilina’s academic research sits at the intersection of race, place, and collective power. Committed to addressing the spatial dimensions of inequity, they pursued economics at Columbia University to gain tools to influence policy on racial segregation and rural disinvestment. Their undergraduate thesis, based on data they collected on teachers’ unions in California, studied the link between faculty bargaining power and teacher segregation, earning them the David Estabrook Romine Prize. They graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with departmental honors. They later earned an MPhil in economic and social history from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where they studied the impact of segregation on political mobilization around toxic waste sites in the United States.

Professionally, Ilina has combined community organizing with their economics and policy toolkit to translate on-the-ground needs into action. Their policy reports with the Office of the Lieutenant Governor examining Washington’s affordable housing crisis and racial discrimination in housing have been cited by state policymakers in the passage of first-of-their-kind reparatory housing policies. Meanwhile, their co-authored paper on the mortality of the US homeless population, forthcoming in The Review of Economics and Statistics, helped motivate Washington State’s decision to join a new federal pilot program to reduce homelessness among Medicaid-eligible Americans in 2024. 

As a JD student at Stanford Law School, Ilina intends to explore the potential of combining law with quantitative analysis to drive structural change. They hope to ultimately work towards dismantling spatial inequities at the policy level, working hand in hand with the communities they both advocate for and belong to.