Ayeh Bandeh-Ahmadi has over two decades’ experience advising policy development at the Departments of Treasury, Defense, State, and Health and Human Services, and at the White House. Most recently, she served on a 10-person team responsible for managing U.S. Treasury’s $20 trillion of marketable debt throughout the COVID-19 outbreak and deployment of the CARES Act. Prior to that, she represented Treasury as its expert on financial applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning to the international Financial Stability Board in Switzerland and briefly served as Program Manager for OFR’s grant programs on the study of financial computation. Before coming to Treasury she studied backer behavior and what makes projects successful at Kickstarter. Her work designing methods to map out technology landscapes of startups and their investors at Quid was featured in BusinessWeek, the Harvard Business Review, and The Telegraph.
As a writer, Bandeh-Ahmadi has been recognized with fellowships from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, Millay Colony for the Arts, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her writing has appeared in PANK and in Entropy’s Top 25 of 2019; is forthcoming in No Tokens and Red Hen Press’ Anthology of North American Muslim Writing; and has been a finalist for the 2020 First Pages Prize and the 2018 Chautauqua Janus Prize recognizing an emerging writer’s work for daring innovations that reorder literary conventions and readers’ imaginations.
Bandeh-Ahmadi is based in Washington D.C. and in Northern California, where she was born and raised by Iranian-born parents. She has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Maryland and a Bachelor’s in Physics and Economics from Caltech, where she was editor-in-chief of the literary magazine, Totem. She has taught personal essay in D.C. high schools through PEN/Faulkner’s Writers in Schools program and previously co-founded and ran a four-time award-winning tutoring and mentoring program in partnership with Alexandria City Public Schools that has and continues to serve thousands of K-12 students. She speaks fluent English and Farsi.
Contact her at ayeh@heyayeh.com.