Arif joined SMERU in October 2022 as a junior qualitative researcher. He is responsible for assisting SMERU researchers in qualitative data collection and analysis. He is capable of doing ethnographic research with research interests covering health, youth, and labor issues.

In 2018, Arif worked as a research intern at the Center for Southeast Asian Social Studies, Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM). During this time, he also initiated an independent research community through which he and his team managed to publish five articles in reputable national journals. After graduating from UGM in 2019, he worked as a research assistant for a study conducted by his former lecturer at UGM and collaborated to publish a book chapter about digital labor in Indonesia.

In 2018, Arif received a thesis grant for the undergraduate level from the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, UGM. He wrote an undergraduate thesis on “Understanding the Risk of Stunted Children from the Social Stratification Perspective: An Analysis of the Secondary Data from the Fifth Wave of the Indonesia Family Life Survey”. In 2019, Arif graduated as a valedictorian with a 3.87 GPA. In 2022, Arif obtained a master’s degree from the Department of Anthropology, Universitas Indonesia, with a 3.83 GPA.