Maya is half-Tibetan and half-Indian, and grew up in India. She graduated high school from the Mahindra United World College of India, and took a gap year before attending Middlebury College for her undergraduate studies. Since then, she's worked in economic and data-focused roles across the private and public sectors. For the past three years, she has worked with Precision Development, a nonprofit that provides mobile phone-based, customized agricultural advisory to smallholder farmers. Through her work, she's developed an interest in behavioral science and evidence-based public program design and implementation, which is the area she hopes to work in following the MPA.