Aja Kennedy is currently a diplomat in the U.S. Department of State Foreign Service, where she has worked since July 2017. Aja currently serves as a consular officer in the U.S. Embassy at Bogota, Colombia. She previously served two years in Hermosillo, Mexico and spent time covering the Bolivian Affairs desk for the Department in Washington, D.C. Aja is a Peace Corps alumna, having served in the Darien province of Panama between 2013-2015. She has a Master's degree in International Development from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton and a Bachelor's Degree in Spanish and Global Studies from UNC Chapel Hill. Aja hopes to pivot from her diplomacy work into a career in research and pursue a Ph.D. in applied microeconomics or public policy. Her primary research interests lie in investigating issues of inequity in the United States and in Latin America, with a focus on evaluating the distributional impacts of public policy in a way that takes into account the fact that marginal wealth, benefits or income has higher utility for those at lower levels of income or wealth. She also hopes to participate in research that evaluates the historical distributional impacts of policies that have disenfranchised Black Americans. Aja was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina.