Shishir Shakya

Dr. Shishir Shakya is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Appalachian State University and an AI/ML web-app developer, educator, and entrepreneur. He uses causal inference to study how regulation and market structure affect access to care, the healthcare workforce, opioid policy, and patient outcomes. He has more than 40 peer-reviewed papers, including work in Nature, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Health Economics, and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, plus policy briefs for the Baker Institute, the Challey Institute, and the Commonwealth Foundation. He is the founding engineer of MyMeritGuide, an agentic-AI platform for scalable, FERPA-aligned oral and written assessment that is free for instructors. MyMeritGuide addresses the unique pain points in college evaluation by helping instructors verify authentic learning and giving students a fairer way to show what they know. He also builds research web apps for meta-analysis, court opinions, news archives, and literature synthesis, and he mentors NIH AIM-AHEAD fellows working on clinical AI.