She completed her PhD in Public Administration from the Maxwell School, Syracuse University in 2015. Her research focuses on understanding the motivations and implications of supplying long-term care services to the elderly in the U.S. Her recent work examines: time tradeoffs associated with informal care, parental dementia and wealth accumulation among adult children, and the effect of formal care services on Medicaid expenditures. A second stream of her research studies evaluation design for cooperative extension programs. Before starting her PhD at Syracuse, Kanika was a Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist for Orbis International – an international non-profit working to prevent and treat blinding eye disease in developing countries.