Menu
No Results Found
Prof Nirmala Rao served as the Vice-Chancellor of the Asian University for Women (AUW), Chittagong, Bangladesh, between 2017 and 2022. Formerly, she held various positions as the Pro-Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and as Pro-Warden for Academic Affairs at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Prof Rao took her first degree in Economics at Delhi University in 1979, Masters from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and PhD from the University of London. She has published extensively in the field of urban politics and some of her books include Re-shaping City Governance; Cities in Transition; Governing London; and Transforming Local Political Leadership. Prof Rao has extensive experience of public service and served as an advisor to a range of bodies including the UK Audit Commission and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM). For a number of years, she was a lay member of the General Council of the Bar of England and Wales, a non-executive director of Ealing Hospital NHS Trust and member of the Architects Registration Board. She is currently a member of the Governing Body of Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, a Trustee of United World Schools and Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish, University of Cambridge. Prof Rao was elected Fellow of the Academy Social Sciences in 2003 and awarded an OBE for services to scholarship in the 2011 Queen’s Honours list.
DPhil, Oxford University
Aashique Ahmed Iqbal is a historian of South Asia. His research interests include Modern South Asian History, Aviation History, Technology History and Military History and his teaching areas are History and Ethics. His research focuses on the impact of aviation on the decolonisation of South Asia. Put simply, it is a study of the role of the aeroplane in bringing modern India into existence. Aviation played a small but crucial role in transforming the Indian state from colony to republic. For both colonial and post-colonial South Asian regimes, the aeroplane would serve not only as a means to project sovereignty but also only as the pre-eminent marker of modernity. Aashique’s doctoral thesis, which is in the process of being prepared for publication, is the first major academic history of aviation. The hybrid nature of the project combines insights from a number of intersecting fields including histories of war, technology, state-making, law, diplomacy and business.
Aashique hails from Ooty and took his BA in History at Loyola College Chennai. He received his MA and MPhil in Modern History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and also holds a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. He has received multiple scholarships including the Felix scholarship, the Royal Historical Society Marshall Fellowship, and the Maulana Azad National Fellowship
Aashique is an Associate Member of the Higher Education Academy of the United Kingdom. He has previously designed and taught courses at the University of Oxford and Shiv Nadar University. His teaching approach emphasises critical engagement with primary and secondary sources.
In addition to his teaching and research, he has been responsible for organising a major international workshop to mark the seventieth anniversary of Indian independence at the Institute for Historical Research, London. He is also keenly interested in making history accessible to the public and has engaged in a number of outreach activities including writing historical blogs and setting questions for the BBC Urdu quiz.
PhD, University of Rochester
Abhishek Shukla graduated with a BA (Hons.) in English from St Stephen’s College, Delhi. He went on to read Anglo-Irish Literature & Drama at University College Dublin, where he wrote a dissertation on Johnathan Swift, and completed his Masters degree with a first class honours. He then enrolled at the University of Rochester, where he went on to specialise in nineteenth-century American literature, and to develop a wide-ranging interest in intellectual history, early-American theology, Pragmatist philosophy, and the influence of early-American thought on later American culture.
He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Jonathan Edwards, in which he examines a wide range of Edwards’s scientific, philosophical, theological, and literary works, and unites them into a single system of metaphysics. As a work of intellectual history, the dissertation examines Edwards’s metaphysics in light of the diverse intellectual tendencies of eighteenth-century New England; and, dwelling on the influence of Calvin, Newton, and Locke, sets forth Edwards’s signal contributions, not only to metaphysics, but also to epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics.
While at Rochester, he also taught, or helped teach, a wide variety of undergraduate courses, from an introductory course in Media Studies to an advanced course in the nineteenth-century British novel; from courses in classical Greek literature and twentieth-century European drama to courses on the interaction of science and religion in America from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
He is a recipient of the Gilman Prize, given each year to an outstanding graduating PhD, and was twice awarded the Dudley Doust Teaching Fellowship at the University of Rochester.
Akanksha Adya is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Krea University, India, and a doctoral candidate in Psychology at the University of West Georgia, United States. Her doctoral research examines how first-time mothers construct meaning of their infant feeding practices in relation to global expert knowledge sources. Akanksha is the first recipient of the Researchers in the Global South Grant Award from the Society for Psychological Society for Social Issues, American Psychological Association (Division 9). Her doctoral dissertation received grant support from the Taraknath Das Foundation, Columbia University, USA.
Drawing upon cultural, feminist, and critical approaches, her research and teaching aims to center the lived experiences of Indian women to decolonize psychology. She loves teaching and has taught Psychology in the United States and India. At Krea, she has designed and taught an elective course, Motherhood, Family, Childcare in India.
She has presented her scholarly work at various national and international forums, and published papers in peer reviewed journals such as the Women & Therapy and Pediatrics journal.
Previously, Akanksha trained as a psychodynamic psychotherapist from Ambedkar University, Delhi, and specialized in attending to mental health concerns of women. Her research and teaching interests include Motherhood studies, Culture and Psychology, Feminism and Psychology, Women and Mental health, Human Development, and Qualitative Research Methods.PhD, Rutgers University
Dr Anannya Dasgupta directs the Centre for Writing and Pedagogy and is Associate Professor in the Division of Literature and the Arts. In her dual role she teaches, develops curriculum and writes in both her areas of interests that took shape during her doctoral work at Rutgers University (New Jersey) where she was also a teaching assistant at the Writing Program. Since 2012 she has been setting up writing centers at various universities in India, developing writing pedagogies especially in academic writing, and training faculty in teaching writing. Her teaching and research interest in literature are in the areas of the British Renaissance Drama, Poetry, and Indian Literature in English. She is also a poet, photographer and artist, and often brings these to bear in her writing and teaching. Some of her publications include an academic monograph:Magical Epistemologies: Forms of Knowledge in Renaissance Drama, a collection of co-edited essays on academic writing: Writing in Academia, a collection of poetry: Between Sure Places, and among other anthologized essays, poetry and short stories, the following essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets and the rhetoric of quarreling: Finding Quarrel in a Straw.
Dr Annu Jalais is an environmental anthropologist working on the human–animal interface, environmental justice, religious identity, caste and migration, particularly in Bangladesh and India. She authored Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans (Routledge, 2010) and co-authored, with Joya Chatterji (History, Trinity College, Cambridge) and Claire Alexander (Sociology, Manchester), The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration (Routledge, 2016). She has taught at the National University of Singapore (NUS), London School of Economics (LSE), Goldsmiths College, and been affiliated with the Agrarian Studies Program, Yale University; the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden; and the Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CEIAS) at the EHESS, Paris, amongst others.
Dr Annu Jalais engages in interdisciplinary research that brings together anthropological, environmental, historical methods and materials. She recently completed work on two grants: (1) ‘Non-humans and zoonoses: what do they tell us about ourselves?’ which brings Asian artists, academics and young scholars to collaborate and teach environmental humanities today (awarded by UParis and NUS); (2) Co-developing the ‘Southern Collective’ to build a Transdisciplinary Collaboratory in the Northern Indian Ocean, in partnership with Dakshin Foundation where she is also an Adjunct Fellow (awarded by the Social Science Research Council [SSRC]).
Anuvinda P has a PhD in Economics, specialising in behavioral and experimental economics, from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her PhD research focused on discrimination in prosociality and competitiveness based on relative economic status. She received the Student Research Grant (2018-19) award from NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre for her doctoral project. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics and Economic and Political Weekly. Her areas of research include experimental economics, behavioral economics, and development economics. She has gained exposure to public policy and law-making in India during her time as a Legislative Assistant to Member of Parliament Fellow (LAMP Fellow, 2014-15). As a LAMP Fellow, she drafted and campaigned for ‘The Rights of Transgender Persons Bill, 2014’, a private member’s bill, which had a unanimous passage in the Upper House of the Indian Parliament. She received her BA (Hons) degree in Economics from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi. She completed her MA, MPhil, and PhD in Economics from the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and was a recipient of the EXIM Bank-JNU scholarship and the UGC Junior Research Fellowship. Prior to joining Krea University, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at All Saints’ College, University of Kerala
Anwesha is an applied economist who works mainly in the field of agricultural and environmental Economics. She has received her ph.d in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of Connecticut. Prior to joining Krea University, she worked as a post-doctoral research scholar at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Piacenza, Italy. She has experience in running both field and laboratory experiments. In her doctoral work she empirically analyzed the value of the nesting habitat of grassland birds in North America by designing an experimental market involving real monetary exchange. Her research has been interdisciplinary involving ecologists, extension specialists, conservation planners and other stakeholders. Currently she is collaborating with Italian and German economists to design a weather-index-insurance and understanding its adoption decision by farmers. In the future, she is interested in exploring Indian consumer/producer’s perception and reaction of the transition toward sustainable agricultural practices using various economic tools. Outside academia, Anwesha is an avid hiker who loves exploring new places and learning about new cultures.
PhD, Humboldt University
Arani is a Sociologist with research interest in media-society interface, transnational migration and religion-politics mutuality in India. As a Hanns-Siedel Fellow he received his PhD from the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University. Arani also has a diploma in media studies jointly from South Asian Media School, Lahore and Goldsmiths, University of London.
Arani’s doctoral thesis was on the role of media in India, where he largely worked on and with the theories of Noam Chomsky and Jurgen Habermas. After his doctoral studies Arani has been critiquing the initiative by the state and the market to bring indigenous people into the fold of ‘modernity’ based solely on economic and technological development criteria, which overlooks the cultural particularism.
Presently Arani is researching on the Indian diaspora and construction of “home” through digital spaces in Germany. Apart from publishing, Arani is teaching several courses including Political Economy of Development, Media and Public Sphere, Exploring Social and the Historical. Simultaneously he is working on his first book.
Dr.Arghya Mondal did his undergraduate studies in the Bachelor of Mathematics programme of Indian Statistical Institute (ISI). After Completing his bachelors, he has enrolled in the integrated PhD programme at The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai. In IMSc his advisor was Mr. Parameswaran Sankaran. Under his supervision he has written his thesis titled “Cohomology of locally symmetric spaces”. He also received his M.Sc degree from IMSc. After submitting his thesis, he visited ISI Bangalore for three months at the beginning of 2017. Then he defended his thesis in April and joined the Mathematics Department of Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, in May as a postdoctoral fellow. He spent a year under the mentor-ship of Mr.U. K. Anandavardhanan. Then he spent three years at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai as a visiting fellow. There his mentors were Mr.Mahan Mj and Mr.Anish Ghosh. And his last postdoctoral fellowship was in Chennai Mathematical Institute. Apart from research, he got the opportunity to teach there which was a very rewarding experience.
His research is in analytic and geometric aspects of group theory.
PhD, Mathematics, University of California at San Diego
BTech, IIT Madras
Bharath Sethuraman received his BTech from IIT Madras, and then switched to pure mathematics. He got his PhD in mathematics from the University of California at San Diego, and then spent the next twenty-six years as a professor of mathematics at California State University Northridge.
Prof Sethuraman has published over thirty research papers in different areas of mathematics, spanning algebraic number theory, algebraic geometry, and space-time coding theory. He has had several research collaborations with both mathematicians and engineers, and has spent extended periods of time as visiting professor and researcher at universities across the world. In India these include IIT Bombay, ISI Bangalore, and Azim Premji University. He has been the recipient of several research grants from the US National Science Foundation, as well as other research and teaching grants.
Prof Sethuraman is passionate about undergraduate teaching and student mentoring. He has written three undergraduate textbooks: Rings Fields and Vector Spaces, A Gentle Introduction to Abstract Algebra, and the latest, Proofs and Ideas: A Prelude to Advanced Mathematics. He has also written numerous expository papers, and has mentored students in high schools. He is particularly proud of his recent school students, who published an article in a journal for math teachers based on their independent solution to the N-Queens problem.
Prof Sethuraman loves cycling, music, and reading.
PhD, Manipal University
An ecologist who enjoys using an interdisciplinary approach to explore and address challenges posed by the dynamism between environment and society, Bharath Sundaram was previously an Associate Professor of Human Ecology, School of Ecology and Environment Studies, at Nalanda University. He completed his PhD, from Manipal University, Masters from Pondicherry University, and undergraduate studies from Madras University.
Bharath combines his training in the ecological sciences with the application of theoretical and empirical advances from related domains like environmental history, subaltern studies, ethnography, and environmental politics to interrogate the roots of our contemporary environmental crisis.
Bharat has research interests in the field of Biodiversity, Plant Ecology, Conservation Studies, Sustainability and Political Ecology. His teaching areas include Tools and Methods in Environmental Studies, Sustainability and Climate Change, Ecology and Development, Political Ecology of Biodiversity Conservation, Environmental Communication and Scientific Reasoning.
In the past, Bharath has worked on human-elephant conflict, tiger and prey monitoring, and the socio-ecological implications of alien invasive species spread in forests. His current work includes the long-term monitoring of a social-ecological system in the Western Ghats, and a pan-Indian, data-driven project on forests, human population, and biodiversity conservation. His research has been funded by the International Foundation for Science (Sweden), International Social Science Council (France), and the National Geographic Society (USA).
Bharath enjoys using the classroom environment to nudge students towards deeper comprehension and critical analysis. When in class or when interacting with students outside, he is constantly thinking about how best to make teaching and learning more relevant in this information age where a data glut has not been particularly commensurate with knowledge generation.
Bharath grew up in the city of Madras (now Chennai). He enjoyed playing badminton and basketball till a torn anterior cruciate ligament made him switch to table tennis. He is an avid film buff, amateur photographer, and cook. He specialises in putting a complete meal together in 40 minutes, starting from scratch.
DPhil, Oxford University
Bishnu N. Mohapatra is a political scientist and poet, an educator and a commentator on society, governance, policy and culture. Bishnu has taught politics for more than twenty-five years at University of Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University and AzimPremji University. He has held visiting appointments at Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, National University of Singapore, University of Kyoto, Japan, and National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. He has lectured at several universities in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. From 2002 to 2010, he headed the governance portfolio of the Ford Foundation’s South Asia office, New Delhi.
Bishnu has published in the areas of identity politics, democracy, minority rights, urban politics, civil society and social capital. He is currently researching on cities and their multiple imaginings in history. He is also in the process of initiating a collective research project that seeks to understand the conceptual universe embedded in India’s Bhasa literature.
Bishnu is also a well-known Indian poet. He has authored four books of poetry and has translated two volumes of Pablo Neruda’s poetry into Odia. A volume of his poetry in the English translation – a fragile world- was published in 2005. He has a Master’s degree in Political Science from University of Delhi, an MPhil in Politics from Jawaharlal Nehru University and a DPhil in Politics from University of Oxford.
Dr. Brijesh Kumar Mishra holds a PhD in Chemistry and MSc (int.) from IIT Kanpur, India. His Ph.D. research focused on the use of various quantum chemical methods for investigating weak interactions between aromatic moieties. Dr. Mishra worked as a post-doctoral scientist at EPFL, Switzerland, in the Environmental Chemistry Laboratory, where he was engaged in several projects, including modeling the formation mechanism of NDMA (a carcinogenic compound) during ozonation of drinking water. Subsequently, he joined the Drug-Design Lab at Umeå University, Sweden as a post-doctoral researcher, where his work focused primarily on investigating weak interactions in protein-ligand systems. Prior to joining Krea University, Dr. Mishra worked as an Assistant Professor in Chemistry at IIIT-B Bangalore for six years. He also contributed to a large bilateral STEM project between the governments of India and Myanmar — the establishment of the Myanmar Institute of Information Technology, Mandalay, Myanmar. At MIIT, he was involved in capacity building through faculty training, curriculum development and teaching. During his tenure at IIIT-B he received two project grants from SERB, Government of India. He has authored over 30 publications in various International and National journals.
Dr. C.P. Anil Kumar is a mathematician who works in Combinatorics, Number Theory, Algebra, Geometry, Topology and Representation Theory. He received his five-year Integrated MSc. in Mathematics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Then he did another Masters in mathematics from the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA. He was in the industry at Infosys Technologies Limited, Bengaluru for a period of five years. He got his Ph.D from The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. Later he spent his time as a postdoctoral fellow at The Indian Statistical Institute, Bengaluru, Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy, Bengaluru and the Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Prayagraj. He is a passionate researcher and during his postdoctoral period he has published more than fifteen papers in various areas of mathematics. He has received various merit scholarships such as NBHM scholarship when he was studying.
He loves playing Volleyball, Frisbee, Swimming, Hiking, Juggling.
Chirag is a quantum physicist turned climate physicist.
His primary areas of research are atmospheric thermodynamic models, atmospheric radiation and convection, impact of aerosols (air pollution) on global and regional precipitation and near-term climate change projections.
Other areas of interest are climate change impacts and mitigation, planetary pressures of anthropogenic activities, limits to the “circular economy” and resource theory of sustainability.
Chirag was one of the authors of India’s first comprehensive climate change assessment report, the “Assessment of Climate Change over the Indian Region” released in 2020 – the regional analog of the global scale IPCC WG1 reports. He is also a contributing author to the IPCC’s upcoming AR6 report (2021).
Chirag holds two doctorates, the first in quantum theory from the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain (2013) and the second in Earth system sciences from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany (2017). He also spent two years as a Research Associate at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology before joining Krea.
Debangana Mukherjee is a mathematician whose research interest lies in Analysis of Partial Differential Equations. She completed her PhD from IISER PUNE under the supervision of Prof. Mousomi Bhakta in 2018 and obtained a gold medal for the Best Thesis Award in Mathematics. After this, she did her postdoctoral studies in Europe from Montan University, Leoben, Austria and Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. She has published numerous notable international articles in renowned journals. She had an NBHM postdoc scholarship at IIT Bombay before joining Krea.
Deepti holds a M.Phil in Latin American Studies from Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. She has around 3.5 years of teaching experience, which includes her association with Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi and Delhi University as Assistant Professor in literary studies. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in Psychology at the Ambedkar University, Delhi, where she is using psychoanalysis to look at the question of ‘unconscious’ in revolutionary groups in India and Soviet Russia.
She is reading Freud and Lacan closely to unearth the repressed and renunciate subject of revolution (the revolutionary), who is fashioned in such a way that it ends up mirroring what it seeks to dismantle (capital). She is at the moment deeply immersed in the memoirs of Russian revolutionaries like Victor Serge to recover their ‘pastless pasts’.
Dr. Dyotana Banerjee has a Ph.D. in Politics from Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, and an M.SC. in International Development from The University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include politics of urban transformations, remaking of city spaces, caste politics, and urban migration in India. Her doctoral dissertation, titled ‘A Caste-Coded City: Mobility and Marginalization in the Space Politics of Ahmedabad’, looks at how caste operates as one of the principal axes of urbanization in post-liberalization Ahmedabad, a city in the western Indian state of Gujarat. It is an ethnographic study that focuses on the political and cultural production of two distinct kinds of pre and post-liberalization neighbourhoods that belong to Vankar, Rohit and Garoda castes. Dyotana has published her research in international peer-reviewed journals such as Contemporary South Asia, Critical Asian Studies and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. She has also published opinion pieces on The Wire, The Quint and South Asia Journal. Some of the courses that Dyotana has taught in the last three years include Introduction to Politics, Political Thought, Political Economy of India, and Politics and Theories of Urbanisation.
PhD, The New School for Social Research
Geeti’s work focuses on power and privilege in knowledge production, and on how people stake out alternatives. Geeti brings together institutional analysis, sexuality and gender, race and disability, and science and technology studies. Her manuscript, “From Mental Disorder to Emotional Data: Epistemic Power Over Sexual Politics”, looks at how radical shifts in epistemology can mask the preservation of political order as elites reconfigure biomedical classification to limit the redistribution of power. She explored this through the case of how sexuality and psychiatric classification remained intertwined even after ‘homosexuality’ stopped being considered a mental disorder in the US. Her ongoing research examines how the proliferation of biosensors and self-tracking norms and devices are embedding new economies and changing relationships of labour, subjectivity, and consumption among users, service providers, big data private sector organisations, and the state.
At The New School, Geeti received the Dean’s Fellowship in Politics, the 2017 Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award, and the 2019 Frieda Wunderlich Memorial Award for Outstanding Dissertation by an International Student. She has taught elective courses related to sexuality and gender, globalisation, urban politics, decolonial thought, and infrastructure. She is interested in ethics in knowledge production, especially in how infrastructures shape politics and norms.
She holds a PhD from The New School for Social Research and a BA from Bryn Mawr College.
Gowhar has formally taught Political Science and Sociology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels for several years. His ethnographies of political subjectivity in Kashmir examine the intermeshing of the intimate and the political around local agitations, familial grief, narratives of local policemen and fictional writing in Kashmiri language. His writing has appeared in various journals—academic and popular and edited volumes focused on civil wars and anthropology of political violence. A monograph based on his doctoral thesis is slated to be published by Routledge India as part of the series titled Ethnographic Innovations: South Asian Perspectives. His current areas of interest include: masculinity; political subjectivity; anthropology of emotions; literature as an archive of political emotion; humiliation; social movements; fascism and totalitarianism; the idea of implicated subject and collective/political responsibility towards the other. He has acquired his Masters in Political Science from CPS, JNU and completed his MPhil and PhD from Delhi School of Economics, Sociology, University of Delhi.
PhD, Purdue University
Guha Dharmarajan, is a veterinarian and disease ecologist. He received his B.V.Sc. and M.V.Sc. degrees from Madras Veterinary College, and his Ph.D. from Purdue University. He started his postdoctoral research at Purdue and subsequently moved to the Laboratory of Malaria and Vector Research at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Following this, he worked as a Ramanujan Fellow at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata. Before joining Krea, Guha was an Assistant Research Scientist at the Savannah River Ecology Lab, The University of Georgia. Guha’s research is primarily in the fields of disease ecology and ecosystem health. Specifically, he studies how human-mediated environmental perturbations – global climate change, habitat modification and environmental pollution – affect disease dynamics in human and wildlife populations, and in turn how such altered disease dynamics feedback on ecosystem health by impacting eco-evolutionary processes at the individual, population and community scales. Guha has taught students across four institutions in India and the US. At Krea, he teaches ecology, conservation biology and biostatistics.
PhD, Harvard University
PhD, Old Dominion University
An Associate Professor at Krea University, John Mathew concluded a four-year stint in the same capacity at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, in the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2018 before moving to his current position. He has taught previously at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Massachusetts; and Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. With Bachelor’s, Master’s and M.Phil. degrees in Zoology from the Madras Christian College, Chennai (Madras), Tamil Nadu, he holds an additional Master’s (AM) in Medical Anthropology from Harvard University, and two doctorates, one in Ecological Sciences from Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, and the other in the History of Science from Harvard University. His instructional experience includes anthropology, biology, geology, history and the history of science. At Krea, he has co-taught foundational courses in the first year, including ‘Scientific Reasoning’ and ‘Exploring the Social and the Historical’ and is currently involved with co-leading ‘Past, Present and Predicted Environments’ in Environmental Studies, and ‘Life at Different Scales’ in the Biological Sciences, the latter which as a discipline he also co-anchors.
John is in the process of revising a book length manuscript, ‘To Fashion a Fauna for British India’, due for submission to Oxford University Press after reviews. He is also actively researching the plague and influenza epidemics in India in the 1890s and 1918-19 respectively.
John’s interests are fundamentally cross-disciplinary. He retains a deep interest in theatre and music, both of which he brought into conversation with his own research, in the writing and performance of a musical at IISER Pune titled ‘The Sun Was White, The Moon Disobedient’, with the students of the institute in the main. He also founded and directed the institute’s choir there, which he has also done at Krea, helping to helm the December production of ‘A Christmas Carol’ from both a theatrical and choral perspective in 2019.
PhD, University of Chicago
Joya John has earned a PhD, from the University of Chicago. She is passionate about how literary and cultural studies can respond to new challenges in the Indian subcontinent and more globally. Her research has so far focused on issues of environment and ecology in Indian fiction. She is interested in issues of energy, mining, waste, as well as the changing landscape of activism around environmental issues and climate change. She believes that literature can bring valuable insights to environmental issues that are often dominated by scientific and policy approaches. She holds both master’s and MPhil degrees in English Literary Studies from Delhi University.
She is currently working on academic articles on issues of energy security and access in Hindi fiction and the depiction of Adivasi communities and the environment in contemporary novels set in Jharkhand. She has presented her work at the Association for Asian Studies, European Conference of South Asian Studies, the Annual South Asia Conference at Madison, and the American Comparative Literature Association. She has published on issues of sexual harassment at the workplace, Dalit drama, and autoethnography in contemporary Dalit thought.
Joya has over six years teaching experience at Delhi University where she taught courses on Indian writing in translation, Realism and the Novel, and European drama. During graduate school in the United States, she has taught academic and professional writing and courses on environmental issues and globalization in South Asia. When not teaching or researching, she is interested in stand-up comedy and believes irony, satire and comedy have tremendous critical power in contemporary India. She is interested in developing audio content and believes podcasts are the future.
PhD, Indian Institute of Science
Kalyan Chakrabarti has research interests in the interface between biology and chemistry. He held researcher positions in the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (Göttingen, Germany), the National Cancer Institute (in the National Institute of Health, USA) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the Brandeis University, USA.
His work primarily focuses on protein dynamics and he is the coordinator of an international collaboration to develop a comprehensive framework for investigating protein dynamics involving the Max Planck Institutes in Göttingen and Potsdam, FreieUniversität, Berlin in Germany, and the University of Louisville, USA.
He obtained his BSc Chemistry (Hons.) degree from the Presidency University, Kolkata. He went on to receive his master’s and doctorate degrees from the Indian Institute of Science, in biophysics with specialisation in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy of proteins. He has several contributions in the area of functional role of protein dynamics. In 2016, he along with an international collaboration published one of the most comprehensive examples of conformational selection in protein-protein interaction.
Representative publications :
Chakrabarti et al.,High-power 1H composite pulse decoupling provides artifact free exchange-mediated saturation transfer (EST) experiments,Journal of Magnetic Resonance (2016) 269: 65-69. (from the Max Planck Institute).
Chakrabarti et al.,Conformational dynamics and allostery in E2:E3 interactions drive ubiquitination: gp78 and Ube2g2,Structure (2017) 25:794-805. (from the National Cancer Institute)
Chakrabarti et al., Conformational selection in a protein-protein interaction by dynamic pathway analysis,Cell Reports (2016) 14: 32-42. (from the HHMI/Brandeis Univ.).
Chakrabarti et al.,X-ray crystallographic and NMR studies of pantothenatesynthetase provide insights into the mechanism of homotropic inhibition by pantoate,FEBS Journal (2010) 277: 697-712. (from the Indian Institute of Science).
PhD, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Karthik Rao-Cavale has a PhD from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his research interests lie at the intersection of regional political economy, urban studies, economic geography, and development studies. His dissertation constructs a social history of regional road networks, regimes of circulation, and rural development in southern Tamil Nadu (1915 – 1965).
Karthik previously received a Master’s degree in City and Regional Planning from Rutgers University, New Jersey, and a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Karthik’s earlier work in the field of city planning has been published in leading journals such as ‘Transportation Research Record’ and ‘Landscape and Urban Planning’. He has also contributed an empirical chapter to an edited volume on the Indian Supreme Court (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and has edited a special issue of Projections, the MIT Journal of Urban Planning.
PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson, MS, USA
Lakshman is deeply invested in research in the detection and management of catastrophic lifestyle diseases such as cancer. His work has included basic and translational cancer research, and has centred on the early diagnosis of cancers of gastrointestinal cancers. Over the course of this work, his interests have evolved to include the gamut of disciplines that constitute precision medicine.
Lakshman is also engaged with industry to provide scientific expertise and depth for the development of biomedical systems, for the delivery and management of healthcare, such as in the use of electronic health information in prediction/ diagnosis (Healthkon). Most recently, he has helped communicate stem-cell research, services, and products to the general public (Transcell Oncologics).
Lakshman holds a Master’s in Life Sciences from Jawaharlal Nehru University (2004) and a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson, MS, USA (2010). His interest in health extends into his life in the workplace and outside it, and he in writing, photography, yoga, and cycling.
Namrata Sathe graduated with a PhD from the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale in 2020. Her first book project (due to be published by Intellect Books UK) focuses on how mainstream Hindi cinema of the past two decades has captured the pervasiveness of neoliberal values into everyday life. The book theorizes on how forms of neoliberal subjectivity, defined by the values of radical individualism and endless, profit-centred self-promotion, contend with existing social structures of caste, class, sexuality, and religious identity in India.
Namrata’s research has been published in leading peer-reviewed media journals such as Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media and the New Review of Film and Television Studies. She has also published book chapters on Hindi cinema in edited volumes. She is the Assistant Editor of the academic journal Studies in South Asian Film and Media. In her work, she prioritizes an interdisciplinary, critical-cultural studies approach that encompasses the fields of cinema studies, gender and sexuality studies, feminist media studies, and social theory.
When she has time off from teaching or writing, you will find her watching Netflix (preferably something that involves murder). She loves reading and is always looking for new book recommendations.
Panchali Ray is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at the
Division of Humanities & Social Sciences at Krea University. She began her career with a trade union of agricultural workers in rural Bengal, before joining the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University as Assistant Professor in 2013 where she taught for more than five years. In 2018 she took a break from academics to work as a consultant in the development sector to explore the nuances of policy research around precarious labour, home-based work, and global value chains. She is equipped with an interdisciplinary training having obtained a BA degree in History from Calcutta University (Kolkata), MA in Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Science (Mumbai) and a PhD in Gender Studies from Jadavpur University (Kolkata), India.
Her monograph “Politics of Precarity: Gendered Subjects and the Health Care Industry in
Contemporary Kolkata” (OUP, 2019) focuses on how class, caste and gender influences
women’s experience of labour in the nursing profession. Her research not only delves into the contemporary politics of labour an erstwhile stigmatized and devalued profession, but also historically traces the emergence of the figure of the nurse and the nursing attendant. She has since then gone on to work on questions of violence, nationalism and collective politics and edited a volume “Women Speak Nation: Gender, Culture, and Politics” (Routledge, 2020) as well as a special issue “Thinking Gender, Thinking Nation: Ideology, Representations, and Women’s Movements” with South Asian History and Culture (2018). Her forthcoming publications include the co-edited volume “Teaching/Writing Resistance: Women’s Studies in Contemporary Times” which emerges from her engagement with feminist knowledge production and the question of interdisciplinarity in formal university spaces.
Currently she is exploring newer areas of research around climate change, migration,
ecological refugees and gendered labour in Southern Bengal.
Pratik Ghosal completed his undergraduate studies in Mathematics at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, before joining the Chennai Mathematical Institute to pursue his post-graduation in Applications of Mathematics. Around this time, he found Theoretical Computer Science captivating and planned to pursue his research career in that direction. He had conducted his M.Sc. thesis under the guidance of Prof. Prajakta Nimbhorkar where they explored problems related to matching under preferences. Next, he joined the University of Wroclaw, Poland, for his doctoral studies under the guidance of Prof. Katarzyna Paluch. His doctoral thesis, titled “Efficient Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems Related to Rank-maximal Matchings and Rectangle Tiling,” focused on developing algorithms to solve various combinatorial optimization problems. And also, he served as a teaching assistant for Discrete Mathematics and Probability Theory at the University of Wroclaw. Following his PhD, he joined the Chennai Mathematical Institute as a postdoctoral fellow, where he worked on problems related to the fair division of indivisible goods among competing agents. His current research primarily revolves around solving combinatorial optimization problems with a specific emphasis on graph algorithms. Graph algorithms play a crucial role in solving real-world problems involving networks, connections, and relationships. And also, he has an interest in exploring other topics from Algorithms.
Preeti Gulati is an historian of ancient India, and she has worked on religion, identity and power. Her research interests lie in understanding the making of textual traditions, and religious and social dynamics in everyday life. She has done both her PhD (2022) and MPhil (2017) from the Center for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, under the supervision of Prof. Kumkum Roy. Her doctoral thesis, titled ‘Kings, Ascetics, and ‘Others’ – Food Codes and Practices in early India, c.200 BCE – 300 CE’ examined the making of social norms through the lens of everyday practice, by reading foodways as systems of communications that mark identities of ‘self’ vis-à-vis the other. Her research demonstrates how food-related practices – ranging from acquiring, producing, processing, distributing, and consuming food, to nature of items consumed or abstained from, their symbolism, and commensal practices – are key tangible and visible means to define one’s role and status within society, as well as in relation to each other. Her expertise lies in Sanskrit and Pali textual traditions, and unpacking the making of historical literary traditions in India. Her wider research interests lie in everyday practices, histories of ideas, and comparative textual studies.
PhD, University of Chicago
Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi is a social historian, literary critic and political commentator. He studied history and literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and at the University of Chicago, from where he obtained a PhD. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, and was on the faculty of Humanities at the San Francisco State University. Most recently, Prithvi taught history at Karnataka State Open University, Mysore. He has also worked with the American Institute of Indian Studies and Bangalore Central University.
Prithvi’s research interests include the history of dissent, Indian intellectual and religious imaginations, literature and political theory. He has published widely on these themes, both in scholarly forums and popular media. Prithvi edited the works of A.K. Ramanujan and D.R. Nagaraj, which resulted in the publication of three books: Poetry and Prose from Kannada (OUP, 2005); The Flaming Feet and Other Essays on Dalit Movement in India (Permanent Black, 2010); and Listening to the Loom: Essays on Literature, Politics and Violence (Permanent Black, 2012) . At present, he is completing a manuscript entitled Hindu or Not: Anxieties of the Self and the Politics of History in the Making of Virashaiva-Lingayats, which explores the relationship between Vachana poetry and Virashaiva-Lingayat community. He is also translating a volume of Kannada short stories for Aleph Publishers, New Delhi. Prithvi has been a frequent contributor to the Indian Express, Outlook magazine and now writes regularly for ThePrint.in. He writes extensively in Kannada and is a well known Kannada columnist.
Dr. Proma Raychaudhury has completed her Ph.D. at the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University under the EU Marie Curie ETN Global India Fellowship. Her thesis is titled, ‘Gender and Political Parties: Pathways to Women’s Political Participation’. Prior to joining the Ph.D., she had done her M.A. and M.Phil from the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India. Her research interests involve gender and politics, Feminist Institutionalism, populism, and right-wing politics. She has published peer-reviewed papers and public articles in several fora.
PhD, University of St. Andrews
Dr. Rakshi Rath is a social and political psychologist, and earned her PhD, from the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom. She worked with Professor Stephen Reicher and her PhD, was fully funded by the School.
Framed by the theoretical rigour of the social identity approaches, her research enquires into the conditions of mobilisations of hate and solidarity. Her PhD, data consisted of rhetoric and visual culture, speeches, posters, ethnographic approaches and experimental methods in exploring processes of hate mobilisation. Rakshi’s work on intergroup hatred has informed the development of a model of collective hate in a seminal paper co-authored with Reicher and Haslam (representative publication). Trained at a post-graduate level in qualitative and quantitative approaches, Rakshi works with multiple methods in exploring social phenomena and formulating questions of research.
Dr Rath’s work is also practice-led, and she works in collaboration with peace activists and artists towards subverting categories of hate and developing solidarity. This strand of her research is in exploring the dynamics of social solidarities, extending practices towards building communities of care with a focus on accessibility and rights’ based approaches to counselling. She was one of the participants in the first cohort of mental health practitioners trained in Queer Affirmative Counselling Practises by the Mariwala Health Initiative, Mumbai and is currently in training as a Narrative practitioner. Her work in community mental health is also informed and developed with Pratap Kumar Rath in the Utkal-OLS approach to counselling underpinned by right to life with dignity.
Rakshi holds a Masters in psychology from the University of Delhi, and a BA (honours) in psychology from Utkal University.
Representative Publications:
PhD, IIM Calcutta
Dr. Ramachandra Guha is a noted historian and biographer based in Bengaluru. He has taught at the universities of Yale and Stanford, held the Arné Naess Chair at the University of Oslo, and served as the Philippe Roman Professor of History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics and as the Satish Dhawan Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Science.
Guha’s books include a pioneering environmental history, The Unquiet Woods (University of California Press, 1989), and an award-winning social history of cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field (Picador, 2002), which was chosen by The Guardian as one of the ten best books on cricket ever written. India after Gandhi (Macmillan/Ecco Press, 2007) was chosen as a book of the year by the Economist, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out, and Outlook, and as a book of the decade in the Times of India, the Times of London, and The Hindu.
His awards include the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History, the Daily Telegraph/Cricket Society prize, the Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for excellence in social science research, the Ramnath Goenka Prize for excellence in journalism, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the R. K. Narayan Prize. In 2009, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the Republic of India’s third highest civilian honour. In 2008, and again in 2013, Prospect magazine nominated Guha as one of the world’s most influential intellectuals. In 2014, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in the humanities by Yale University. In 2015, he was awarded the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to Asian studies. In 2019, he was made a Honorary Foreign Member of the American Historical Association, only the third Indian to be given that honour.
PhD, Cambridge University
Rishi Vyas is a mathematician whose research interests lie in algebra, with a specific focus on ring theory, homological algebra, and group theory. He is also interested in science policy and the ethical aspects of science, technology, and mathematics.
After earning an undergraduate honours degree in mathematics from St. Stephen’s College, Rishi proceeded to the University of Cambridge for graduate and doctoral studies. At Cambridge, he was supported by fellowships from the Inlaks Foundation and the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust. He wrote his thesis on the homological aspects of noncommutative ring theory.
For his postdoctoral research at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Rishi worked to further understand the homological theory of noncommutative rings; he was supported by a PBC fellowship from the Israel Council for Higher Education. Rishi has also undertaken research in group theory, with a focus on combinatorial group theory and the interplay between group theory, logic, and computability.
Apart from his research and pedagogical interests in mathematics, Rishi has an interest in science policy, and particularly in the ethical aspects of mathematics, science, and technology. In particular, he is very interested in examining the role ethics should play in an undergraduate curriculum.
Rohan Ravindra Gudibande is an economist whose interest lies in development economics and political economy. After completing his PhD from the Graduate Institute, Geneva he pursued post-doctoral research at the Empirical Studies of Conflict Lab (Princeton University), the School of Public and International Affairs (Princeton University) and the Institute for the Study of Religion Economics and Society (Chapman University). Rohan has been closely involved with the policy world. He worked as an economist at the German Development Institute (DIE), Bonn. He has also consulted for UNCTAD, ILO, IMF and Permanent Mission of India to the UN.
His current research aims to understand the outcomes and mechanisms of development in relation to events or processes driving labor markets, different conflicts, crime and social cohesion that organizes individual incentives and behavior. The purpose being to derive clear insights for evaluating existing policies or design new policies. Methodologically, he adopts and refines state of the art inference and computational techniques to establish causal relations exploiting natural variations from policy or historical changes.
Rohan believes that development outcomes are intrinsically linked with politics, and this relationship needs to be rigorously and empirically disentangled within a multi-disciplinary analytical framework drawing from disciplines like political science, data science and psychology. Outside of his professional life, his interests include history of religion, history of science, foreign policy and strategy, travel, and high intensity sports.
Sabah Siddiqui completed her Ph.D. from the University of Manchester on faith healing practices, where she investigated how medical science and traditional/alternative medicine intersect in mental health service provision. She used methods from critical psychology, ethnography, and social geography. She also explored the place of fiction in social science methodologies through the trope of ghost stories. She was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award by the Faculty of Humanities, University of Manchester twice, in 2016 and 2018. Her work on faith healing has been published in the form of a book, chapters in edited books, and journal articles.
Sabah is a psychodynamic psychotherapist, with a three-year M.Phil. in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy from Ambedkar University Delhi. She brings together psychoanalytic insights from Freud, Lacan, Object Relations, and Group Analysis to inform her work. She co-edited the book Islamic Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Islam, which was nominated for the 2019 Gradiva Award for Best Edited Book. She is currently a member of the editorial boards of Psychoanalysis, Culture, & Society, and the Annual Review of Critical Psychology.
Sabah works on the intersections of sex, gender, and power. She has worked as a research consultant and writer on topics such as gendered violence, domestic and sexual abuse, violence against women and girls with disabilities, and violence against women deemed mad. In 2018, she was one of the editors of the special issue for the Annual Review of Critical Psychology on Sex and Power in the University, which explored the questions of sexual harassment and violence in the university setting.
At present, Sabah is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, and Co-Investigator on a British Academy grant on traditional medicine in Manchester using a community asset mapping methodology. She is co-editing a special issue for the Palgrave Journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture, & Society titled Nationalisms and their Discontents: South Asian Perspectives (to be published in late 2022). She is also contributing to the second edition of A Critical History and Philosophy of Psychology (Cambridge University Press).
PhD, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK
Dr Sambaiah Gundimeda, who hails from a sleepy village called Gundimeda in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, had his BA in Special English, Political Science and History from Andhra Loyola College, Vijayawada. After securing MA and MPhil in Political Science from the University of Hyderabad, he secured Ford Foundation International Fellowship to pursue PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK. While finalizing his PhD, Dr Gundimeda joined the Council for Social Development, Hyderabad, as an Assistant Professor. Following this, he became a Charles Wallace India Trust Visiting Fellow at IASH, University of Edinburgh, 2013; a Visiting Associate Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi in 2014 and a Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi between 2015 and 2017. Before joining Krea University, he was with Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, for ten years.
Dr. Samyukta Bhupatiraju is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences. Her key areas of interest are Development Economics and Applied Econometrics. She is also interested in Network Economics.
She holds a Ph.D in Economics from United Nations University – MERIT & Maastricht University (The Netherlands), an Advanced Certificate from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (Germany) and an MA in Economics from University of Hyderabad. Prior to joining the School of Law, she has worked as an Assistant Professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai and Hyderabad). She was also an ICSSR Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Economics, University of Hyderabad.
The focus of her Ph D was on the geographic dimensions of growth and development. Since then, she has worked on a variety of issues. Her most recent work focuses on the intersection between finance and development. She has also worked on the development experiences of Latin American economies.
Personal Webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/samyuktabhupatiraju
PhD, Indian Institute of Technology – Madras
Sarabjeet Dhody Natesan is the Associate Professor of Economics at the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Sarabjeet received her PhD, in Management from IIT-Madras, MS in Industrial Management from New Jersey Institute of Technology / Rutgers University – New Jersey, MBE from Delhi University and BA (Honours) in Economics from Jesus and Mary College,Delhi University.
After her Master’s program at the US, she worked as a Consultant at the UNCTAD, UN, New York City. Her return to India was marked with an entrepreneurial journey to support setting up an innovative design and manufacturing engineering firm. She has taught various courses of Economics and Strategy at Delhi University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, Indian Institute of Management-Indore, SPJIMR, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. At SPJIMR (Mumbai), Sarabjeet was the Program Head of an innovative Non-Class Room Learning initiative, the ADMAP, which focused on teaching business school students “How to get things done”; administration skills to future managers and leaders.
Her area of research is in the interdisciplinary field of economics and policy implementation. Using quantitative and qualitative methods in evaluating policy learning and outcome evaluation and establishment of contextual factors affecting implementation, her current research is on the role of implementers in efficient and effective policy outcomes. She has researched and published on MGNREGA and its implementation. She is currently working on ‘Bazaars of 1947-Micro Stories of Businesses in Post Partition India.’ Her research explores migration and its economic and social effects.
Sarabjeet’s journey to Krea reaffirms her faith in the power of undergraduate teaching and scripts her interest in co-creating interdisciplinary spaces and capacities for young impressionable minds. She is currently working on her first book on her diverse life experiences.
Sayandeb Chowdhury’s teaching and research interests are in the history of visuality in colonial South Asia; metropolar modernisms in Europe and South Asia; the history of humour, and adaptation studies. He studied at St Xaviers’ College (BA), Jawaharlal Nehru University (MA), and Jadavpur University (MPhil, PhD). Sayandeb has taught for over a decade at Ambedkar University Delhi and has been a UKNA Fellow at International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden (2015), and Charles Wallace UK Fellow (2016). His essays have been published or are soon to be in Film International, Journal of South Asian History and Culture (2015, 2017), South Asia Review, European Journal of English Studies, Economic and Political Weekly (2016, 2019) and thematic collections published by Palgrave Macmillan (2016, 2018), Routledge (2016, 2017, 2019, 2023), and university presses of Brussels (2017), Amsterdam (2019) and Manchester (2024). His monograph Uttam Kumar: A Life in Cinema was published by Bloomsbury in 2021. His other project is a public history archive of caricature (https://humourinbengal.info/). He also contributes to the cultural press including Huffington Post and The Monthly Review, Art India, Outlook, Indian Express, TheWire, Scroll, Business Standard, The Hindu; Deccan Herald, Biblio, Caravan, and in Bengali for Anandabazaar Patrika and the literary periodical Desh. More about his work can be found at https://sayandeb.in/
Sayantan Datta is a Faculty Teaching Associate at the Centre for Writing and Pedagogy, Krea University. Originally trained as a neuroscientist, they now dip their feet in science writing, communication and journalism. Their current work critically evaluates science and science practice in India, and lies at an intersection of science, caste, gender, sexuality and health. They are also interested in investigating the relationship between close-reading of scientific texts and how that can lead to new scientific questions as well as insights.
Their writing has appeared in various forums, some of which include Scientific American, The Wire, Economic and Political Weekly, IndiaBioScience.org, TheLifeofScience.com and The Swaddle. They have also published in peer-reviewed journals, and their recent book chapter, “Finding (Homo)Sexuality in the Genome: A Critique of Genetic Investigations on Sexuality”, has been published in “Sexuality, Abjection and Queer Existence in Contemporary India” (2021), a volume edited by Pushpesh Kumar and published by Routledge.
They have also been invited to give public talks at various forums, including the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Ashoka University, Microsoft, Anveshi Centre for Women’s Studies, DE Shaw and Co, and the University of Hyderabad. They are also a part of the feminist multimedia science collective, TheLifeofScience.com and a committee member at queer/disrupt at the University of Warwick. One can read more about them and what they have written at sayantanspins.com.
Dr. Sharin Shajahan Naomi completed Ph.D in Tibetan Buddhism, Feminism and autoethnography from Murdoch University, Australia. She was awarded the Australian Leadership Award 2010 for pursuing Master of Arts in Human Rights at Curtin University. She did Bachelor in Law from the University of Dhaka. While studying law, she represented the university at national and international moot court competitions on International Human rights law and received awards for mooting.
She worked as an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Asian University for Women. She served as the head of core program from October, 2021 to September, 2022 at Asian University for Women. In 2019, she received DHS Fellowship and Cornel Climate Online Fellowship. Her publications and research experience include feminism, anti-feminist backlash, disability, violence against women, women empowerment, online social movement, indigenous rights, human rights and humanitarian law, refugee rights, peace and conflict resolution, international relations and foreign policy, post-colonial knowledge and environmental justice.
Shibi Vasudevan’s research interests are in the areas of applied analysis, differential equations and fluid mechanics. His current work is broadly focused on the following themes: stability of solutions to partial differential equation (PDE) models arising from incompressible fluids and atmospheric sciences and in finding ways of obtaining or characterizing (unstable) eigenvalues of linearized differential operators.
He obtained an M.A. and Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Missouri-Columbia, U.S.A following which he was a postdoctoral fellow at the International Center for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bangalore and the Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI) in Chennai. His earlier degrees were in engineering (M.S. in aerospace engineering from Iowa State University and B.E. in mechanical engineering from NITK Surathkal).
He also enjoys teaching mathematics and interacting with students. Apart from research and teaching in mathematics, he is interested in increasing access and educational opportunities in mathematics amongst regions and peoples that are traditionally underrepresented.
Outside of mathematics, he is very interested in music (and listens a lot to Carnatic music and European vocal polyphonic music), the game of cricket, reading nonfiction (especially history) and hiking in the woods.
Shilpi Singh has worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi. She has 5.6 years of experience in teaching. She completed her Doctorate from the Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She was a Visiting Scholar at the South Asia Institute, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. For her PhD thesis she studied contemporary weddings as a site of consumption standing at the crossroads of culture and economy of particular classes in urban society. Her curiosity to understand urban processes because of capital flows pushes her to critically explore the question of labour and subjectivities in a neoliberal urban milieu. It is a mix of theoretical and ethnographic work, which have been rather new to the discipline. Her research interests are Consumption, Class Culture, Popular Culture, Political Economy, Indian Philosophy and Feminist Pedagogy.
PhD, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Shivani Jadeja holds a PhD in Biological Sciences with specialization in Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA and an MSc in Wildlife Biology and Conservation from the Wildlife Conservation Society – India Program at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, India.
Her teaching and research draws from her international exposure to state-of-the-art teaching and research facilities in India, USA, and Costa Rica. She teaches biology and data analytics to undergraduate students and mentors them to carry out inquiry driven projects both in the field and in the laboratory. Her student-centred teaching style emphasizes development of higher-order thinking skills including critical thinking, problem-solving, and synthesis.
Her broad research interests are primarily in the field of evolutionary ecology that span understanding causes and consequences of variation in life history strategies and plant-animal interactions. Her research investigates shifts in organisms’ strategies and interactions in response to changes in their environment. She uses a range of empirical and theoretical approaches to address her questions. She has studied the role of within-species variation in territorial behaviour of a seed disperser in facilitating the dispersal of a woody invasive tree in grassland habitats. Recent work involved identifying mechanisms underlying and consequences of variation in reproductive life-history strategies of sequentially flowering plants and their seed-herbivores. Currently, her research is focused on understanding the effect of rising temperatures on the butterfly life cycle.
Shuchita Goyal is a mathematician, and her interests lie mainly in Topology and Combinatorics. She worked at IIT Kanpur with Prof. Nandini Nilakantan on the homotopy type of independence complexes of certain graph classes.Before joining IIT Kanpur, she was at IIT Delhi for a short while and worked with Prof. Priyavrat Deshpande in CMI.She obtained her PhD in Topological Combinatorics under the supervision of Prof. Rekha Santhanam from the Department of Mathematics at IIT Bombay. Her master’s is from IIT Guwahati in Mathematics & Computing.
Shyam Kumar Sudhakar is a Neuroscientist with interests and specialization in the field of Computational Neuroscience. Shyam is interested in studying pathological brain states (Epilepsy, Traumatic Brain Injury) with the aim of identifying promising therapeutics to repair the aberrant brain circuits. Shyam does so by using biologically realistic computational modeling and collaborating with experimental researchers in the field. Shyam’s long-term goal is to study how network activity and oscillations are altered in neurological disorders and develop novel strategies to stop the abnormal functioning in such brain states. Shyam believes that his research work would greatly help to uncover the brain mechanisms of behavior and how those mechanisms become abnormal in neurodegenerative diseases.
Shyam received his PhD from Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium. At Antwerp, he was supported by the prestigious Marie-Curie fellowship for 3 years and subsequently with funds from Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan. During his PhD, he developed a large-scale network model of the granular layer of the cerebellar cortex.
Shyam then went on to pursue post-doctoral training at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States. During his postdoctoral training, he focused on computational modeling of neurological disorders (Epilepsy, Traumatic Brain Injury) and modeling of oscillations generated in a brain region called retrosplenial cortex. Prior to joining Krea University, Shyam briefly worked as a post-doctoral researcher at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.
Shyam is an avid traveler and loves exploring new places. In addition to traveling, Shyam spends his free time learning more about financial markets.
PhD, The George Washington University
Dr. Shyama Rajendran received her PhD, in English Literature from The George Washington University in 2017. Her research is centred on late medieval literature (focusing on authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Mandeville), and explores varied forms of cultural and linguistic belonging and how demarcations of difference are culturally reproduced.
She brings together medieval literature, sociolinguistics, critical race theory, disability theory, and gender studies in order to develop productive conversations that exist at the intersections of these fields. For example, her article titled “E(race)ing the Future: Imagined Medieval Reproductive Possibilities and the Monstrosity of Power” (forthcoming in 2019), argues that ideas of monstrosity in disability studies and critical race theory are poised to intersect with each other, as both offer models of alterity that productively challenge implicit Eurocentric social and religious norms. The article compares two late medieval romances, the King of Tars and The Man of Law’s Tale and focuses on fantasies of reproductive futurity as the link between monstrosity, race, and disability, and the need to attend to the metalanguage of difference.
Her research also situates English multilingual authors within the context of the global middle ages and draws on methodologies from scholars working in non-European contexts, such as the medieval Mediterranean, bridging the conversation between the English and European Middle Ages with the global Middle Ages.
Dr. Siddharth Dwivedi works in the area of particle physics phenomenology. His research mainly deals with investigating the signatures of Beyond Standard Model (BSM) physics at high energy particle collision experiments like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. After finishing his PhD from Harish Chandra Research Institute, Prayagraj (Allahabad), he has worked as a post-doctotal fellow at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Sciences, Kolkata for two years and then subsequently at the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar for one year before joining Krea.
In his studies related to exploration of BSM signatures at colliders, Siddharth has worked on both model-dependent and model-independent approaches towards modeling the new physics effects. Some of the directions pursued by him include exploration of kinematic signatures of anomalous gauge-Higgs couplings arising out of Higher Dimensional Operators. He has also explored the collider searches associated with the Two-Higgs Doublet Models, a class of BSM scenario associated with an extended scalar sector .
Apart from research he is interested in Hindustani Classical music, ghazals and urdu poetry.
PhD, Indian Institute of Technology – Madras
A theoretical physicist, Sivakumar is interested in quantum and classical dynamics, and statistical physics. He studied physics at IIT-Madras, Chennai and then joined the Department of Atomic Energy as a scientist. He spent more than two decades researching problems critical to the nation building objective of the DAE.
He has also made consistent and significant contributions to the theoretical and experimental physics aspects of the operation and design modifications of the research reactors at the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research, Kalpakkam. His interests in research span from applied research to basic research as well. His earlier research covered coherent states, atom-field interaction and quantum entanglement. His more recent interests are in the quantum optics-quantum information frontier. He actively pursues issues related to identifying realizable physical systems for use in quantum metrology and quantum information processing. Manifestations of quantum entanglement in condensed matter is another area that he is exploring.
He has a passion for teaching physics and has two decades of experience in teaching various physics courses for undergraduates, post-graduates, and research scholars. Prior to joining Krea University, he was associated with the Homi Bhabha National Institute and Chennai Mathematical Institute. He has mentored many physics and engineering students for their Masters’ theses. All of whom have taken up research as their career. His other interests include mathematics and history of physics.
Sonali Chunodkar is driven by an abiding fascination with why artworks are able to affect us and influence our lives in myriad ways as well as how fiction, belief, knowledge, and truth become blurred during our lived experiences. The interdisciplinary nature of her research questions has involved her deeply with areas like fantasy and science fiction, narrative theory, aesthetic response studies, and phenomenological philosophy.
After an unconventional educational path, she completed her M.Phil. (2015) and Ph.D. (2020) degrees at the Department of English, Savitribai Phule Pune University, where she was a UGC Junior and Senior Research Fellow. Her M.Phil. thesis offered a cognitive narratological account of how J. R. R. Tolkien’s narrative, stylistic strategies and the reader’s co-creative activity together facilitate the achievement of “secondary belief.” Her Ph.D. dissertation attempted a Husserlian phenomenological investigation into the very possibility of belief during the act of reading in general and that of Tolkien’s fantasy fiction in particular.
She has presented at conferences organized by the World Phenomenology Institute, Husserl Archives Cologne, The Tolkien Society, and Popular Culture Association. Besides co-editing a volume on phenomenology in India (under contract with Springer), she is currently working on papers on Edith Stein, Tolkien, Indian mythological fantasy fiction in English, and theatrical experience. Her time at Krea University will be primarily devoted to exploring the ethical dilemmas arising from the performance art audience’s aesthetic experiences through the lens of Edmund Husserl and Emmanuel Levinas’s respective phenomenologies.
Soumya Dey is a mathematician broadly interested in Geometry and Topology.
Soumya graduated with a PhD in Mathematics from IISER Mohali in 2018, after completing BSc (Hons) in Mathematics from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, and MSc in Mathematics from RKM Vivekananda University, Belur. Thereafter, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at IISER Bhopal, the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai and Chennai Mathematical Institute, Kelambakkam successively, before joining Krea University in 2022. As part of his doctoral thesis, Soumya computed explicit presentations with finite generating sets for the commutator subgroups of some generalized braid groups. As a postdoc, he started working on mapping class groups of surfaces, singular braid groups, and related infinite groups.
Soumya strongly believes that active discussion and collaboration is an indispensable part of doing mathematics, and this culture should be inculcated into undergraduate classrooms. He co-organized several conferences, workshops and seminars, at both national and international levels, which are aimed at researchers and graduate students. Also, he has been actively involved as a volunteer in science outreach activities for students and teachers in schools and colleges.
Soumya enjoys playing table tennis, traveling to places, listening to music of all sorts, watching movies and humming his favourite songs endlessly.
PhD, Manipal University
Srajana Kaikini has a Ph.D., in Philosophy from the Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal University (2019). She did her Curatorial Studies at de Appel’s Curatorial Programme 2012-13, Amsterdam, holds a Masters in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and a Bachelors in Architecture. She has trained in classical dance and music and considers herself a creative accomplice. She has been the recipient of the ISCP-Inlaks Curatorial Residency 2019, the Ffai Research Grant 2018, the CIMAM – Samdani Foundation Travel Grant 2018, FICA Research Fellowship 2013-14 and has undertaken residencies at Delfina Foundation(London) and ISCP (New York). She was the collections curator at the K K Hebbar Gallery and Arts Centre (2016-2019). Recent curatorial works include Backstage of Biology at Archives at National Centre for Biological Sciences (2019) and Vectors of Kinship (2016) at 11th Shanghai Biennale. She is Editor in Chief of SciPhiWeb Repository of Reflections in Science, Philosophy and Gaming and on the Editorial board of Barefoot Philosophers. Her research has been published in journals like Voices in Bioethics, Journal of Sociology, The Deleuze Studies: India Special Issue, Kunstlicht Tijdschrift, Journal of Cancer Research and Therapeutics and she is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines.
Her doctoral research focussed on developing a philosophy of curatorial practice with a focus on ontology of relations. Her research interests include metaphysics, aesthetics, curatorial studies, arts pedagogy, kinship and relations, philosophy of language, philosophy of art, image, cinema and space and her teaching areas include Arts, Philosophy and Humanities. She continues to explore her creative possibilities in the world.
Dr. Srikrishnan Divakaran is a Theoretical Computer Scientist with over 25 years of experience in education and research, as well as over 5 years of industry experience in computing and finance with leading international companies. In 2002, Dr. Divakaran received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He then worked as an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Hofstra University on Long Island, NY, from 2002 to 2008, and as an Associate Professor at DAIICT from 2009 to 2016, before becoming an Associate Professor at Ahmedabad University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.Dr. Divakaran has taught a variety of courses in Computer Science and related disciplines such as Applied Mathematics, Computational Biology/Bioinformatics, and Data Sciences. Dr. Divakaran’s research focuses on designing and analyzing algorithms for problems with applications in Computational Biology/Bioinformatics, Combinatorial Optimization, and Data Science.
Suchika Chopra is an applied microeconomist with research interests in health economics and labor economics. She holds a Doctorate in Economics from the University of Georgia. Prior to her doctoral studies, she gained experience as a research assistant at the Reserve Bank of India, where she worked on the monetary policy transmission channels. Additionally, she worked as an Economics Content Writer at Mint (Hindustan Times), covering various topical issues. She also completed an internship at Niti Aayog, where she studied public-private partnerships in road infrastructure. Her academic qualifications include a Master’s degree in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Delhi.
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Sumitra Ranganathan received her PhD, in Music from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015. She transitioned to the humanities after a sixteen-year career as an e-commerce specialist, with eight years at the middle manager level, prior to which, she was a research fellow in theoretical high-energy physics. Sumitra also has an MS in systems and information and an MSc in physics. Sumitra’s research is situated within the humanistic disciplines of ethnomusicology, socio-cultural anthropology, music cognition, cultural studies and history. Her research interests are in the dynamics of tradition, intelligibility and categorical knowledge in the cultural traditions of post-colonial India, and in interrogating the meaningfulness and on-going relevance of cultural practices in developing senses of place and ethical behaviors. As part of her research, Sumitra has documented one of India’s most historic and valuable traditions of Dhrupad, the Bettiah gharana, which is today a seriously endangered practice. She has studied music with Pt. Falguni Mitra since 1989, and with Pt. Indra Kishore Mishra since 2007.
In addition to her core competence in the Humanities, during her career in the IT industry, Sumitra gained in-depth domain experience in environmental management, international trade logistics, and supply chain management. Most recently, she worked as a senior researcher in an Urban Governance action research group, and her domain knowledge expanded to include urban informality, human rights and solid waste management in Indian cities.
At Krea University, Sumitra will teach courses on topics related to Indian music and dance, ethnomusicology, socio-cultural anthropology, music cognition, and cultural studies. Previously, she has taught courses on musical traditions of different cultures, database and systems design, mathematics and physics. She particularly enjoys working with young adults on career and higher education trajectories, to explore nascent interests, fellowship opportunities, career choices and career paths.
A Howard Mayer Brown Fellow of the American Musicological Society (2009), Sumitra’s work has been supported by several fellowships including a Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund dissertation fellowship (2012), a 12-month Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship (2010), and a special grant from the India Foundation for the Arts, Bengaluru, to develop a pilot technology-based environment to document and support endangered cultural practices (2012). She is currently working on a book project, supported in part by a two-year Senior Research Fellowship, Ministry of Culture, Government of India (2017 – 2019).
Surajit Kayal obtained his bachelors (BSc Honours) in Chemistry from the Calcutta University and M.Sc in Chemistry from IIT Delhi. After M.Sc, he taught at RGUKT Hyderabad as a lecturer. He secured 29th rank in CSIR and obtained his PhD from Indian Institute Science, Bangalore under Prof. Siva Umapathy. His thesis involves the development of ultrafast stimulated Raman experimental setup and applying it to various chemical problems. After his PhD work, he joined University of Nottingham, UK as a postdoctoral fellow where he worked with Prof. MW George and Prof. Sir Martyn Poliakoff. There he worked on time-resolved Infrared Spectroscopy. His research interest is in the area of time-resolved spectroscopy, especially time-resolved vibrational spectroscopy. He is very much interested in applying this structure specific tool to understand excited state chemical processes in real-time. He returned to India in 2022 and worked for Elsevier as an Associate Scientific Editor before joining Krea University in 2023.
PhD, Indian Institute of Technology – Bombay
Sushant K. Raut is a particle physicist, specializing in the phenomenology of neutrinos. After completing his PhD, from IIT Bombay, he has held post-doctoral positions at Physical Research Laboratory (Ahmedabad), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm), Institute for Basic Science (Daejeon), and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Daejeon).
His current scientific goals involve the measurement of the neutrino mass and mixing parameters, and the discovery of potential Beyond Standard Model effects using neutrinos. To this end he has performed studies of the synergies between various current and future neutrino oscillation experiments, and of the symmetries of the neutrino mass matrix. He is involved with the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), one of the proposed mega science projects in the country.
Sushant believes that science education can help in solving many of the problems in society, not merely through technological advances, but also through the inculcation of scientific temper and rational thinking. Therefore, he has been keenly interested in education and scientific outreach. Apart from regular university courses, he has taught at summer schools and has been a co-organizer of the `Science on Tap’ series of popular science talks in Daejeon. He is interested in starting and promoting other science vulgarization programmes too. Outside of his professional life, his interests include travel, history and culture, books, cooking, and languages and scripts.
Associated Weblinks
PhD, University of Madras
Swarnamalya is a combination of a performer with over 35 years of experience, a scholar of dance history as well as a trained academician in art practice and sociology. Her Ph.D dissertation was on “Research and Reconstruction of lost dance repertories of Early modern South India (Nayak Period)”. In a pioneering effort she studied in- depth the history and sources involved in the lost performing traditions to reconstruct them. “From The Attic” is a performance- lecture- exhibition series based on her research. From collaborations with artistes of various genres to reflecting the multi cultural historicity of dance and music in South India, FTA stands as a unique voice that speaks of inclusivity and plurality as inherent values of performing traditions. Jakkini, Sivalila, Gondhali, Perani are some of her reconstructed repertoires widely appreciated.
Her further research interests include Sadir as the subaltern form of Bharatanatyam through gender, culture, society, stigma and political movements. Her first book was titled Nammai Marandarai Naam Marakkamattom (Tamil) based on her very successful stage production of the same title, from Silappadikaram from the POV of Madhavi, the danseuse. She researched to bring to light the history of repertoires in early 20th century Madras, under her production Dancing in the Parlour. Her more recent production Choreographing Society- a tryst with destiny raises critical questions around inherent inequalities; identities, stigma and the legal frame striving to relieve democracy from it. As a writer and thinker, some of her eminent contributions to critical theories on performance history call for interrogation of post colonial scholarship through her on-going project “Decolonising dance history” where she develops new and experimental methods of writing performance histories; Decolonising Dance History Project, Notions of Classical in Bharatanatyam, Sex and Gender in Performance, Mired in Dravidian Politics, Womanity, Daughters of Pandanallur – the other story.
In her professorial capacity she has designed and taught courses such as Past Performing Practices, Art as History, Women in Performance, Literature and Media that cover archival writing practices and performance in the study of the body and culture as a lived experience. Her more recent addition has been a workshop style course on ditties and dances of folk and tribal cultures from across the world titled “Or Muf Leh” She is also a sought after speaker on topics pertaining to Education, art and culture.
As a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow for Academic and Professional Excellence, Swarnamalya went to UCLA to teach and pursue post doctoral research. She is trained in Indian and Middle Eastern music, epigraphy, history and archaeology. She has received prestigious awards and fellowships for her contributions including the recent KREA- Faculty Research Fellowship for 20-21. She is currently Assistant Professor of Practice (Arts), KREA University, India. She is also the Director of Ranga Mandira Academy of World Dance/ Performance and Indic Studies which works at providing education in Performing Arts. Ranga Mandira runs a community radio for the arts and also creates a platform for sustainable development for the hereditary artiste communities. She has served as a visiting faculty at SASTRA University, Madras University, and a guest faculty to Ashoka University, Bridgewater State University (Boston), and Flame University in India.
PhD, The Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Syed Mohammad Meesum holds a PhD, in Theoretical Computer Science from The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, HBNI, Chennai. He is interested in understanding the limits to which algorithms for solving problems can be improved to run faster. His primary area of research involves designing approximate and parameterized algorithms.
Meesum did his undergraduate studies in Physics at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, where he graduated with an Integrated MSc He also gained corporate experience as a derivative analyst at Futures First trading Euro-Dollar interest rate futures. Subsequently, he joined IMSc for an Integrated PhD, program, where his doctoral thesis was titled “Matrix Editing via Multivariate Lens”.
Following his PhD, Meesum was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, University of Wrocław, Poland where he was supported by the Polish National Science Centre grant. He is an amateur astronomer by passion, and enjoys solving mathematical puzzles
Assistant Professor of Computer Science,
Sciences
Ph.D., Indian Institute of Science
T. V. H. Prathamesh works in the intersection of logic, computer science and mathematics. More specifically, he works on application of formal methods of computer science to mathematics. The primary focus of his research is formalization of mathematics and theoretical computer science in type theory, and automated verification of mathematical proofs. His research is motivated by the need for formal verification of computer programs used for research in mathematics and theoretical computer science, and the potential use of computers in verifying controversial mathematical proofs. He is in particular fascinated by the insights that one derives about familiar mathematical objects and proofs, when attempting to find the appropriate formal representation for the purpose of computer-aided proof checking.
He has contributed to the development of formal proofs in mathematics and theoretical computer science in Isabelle/HOL, a proof assistant based on Higher Order Logic. Prathamesh has also undertaken research and continues to retain an interest in algorithmic and combinatorial aspects of knot theory, and in the interplay of geometric group theory, computability and logic.
Prathamesh did his undergraduate studies in Mathematics at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. Thereafter he pursued an Integrated Ph.D., in Mathematics from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. His doctoral thesis was titled ‘Mechanizing Knot Theory”. Subsequently, he spent two stimulating years as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. After a short stint as a Visiting Scientist at the Indian Statistical Institute, Prathamesh joined the computational logic group of the Institute für Informatik – Universität Innsbruck in Austria as a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the FWF-funded Fortissimo project.
His other interests include philosophy of science and social dimensions of science. He is particularly interested in the potential role of science and math education in dissemination of critical thinking and scientific temper. He grew up all around India, but retains a soft corner for the city of Chennai.
Tanmoy Chakrabarty is an experimental physicist in condensed matter. His main expertise is solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (SSNMR) which is a powerful local probe technique used in various disciplines. Apart from NMR, he also uses different bulk solid state probes to study low-dimensional and geometrically frustrated magnetic systems which are finally studied in details using SSNMR. Additionally, his research interest also includes dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) which is an extension of conventional NMR technique to enhance signal to noise manifold times.
After finishing his Masters and doctoral studies in IIT Bombay he did postdoc in TIFR Mumbai and next in Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel for 1 year each. Thereafter, he was awarded an international postdoctoral grant (Mobilitas Pluss) as a principal investigator in NICPB, Tallinn, Estonia for 2 years. His last postdoc was in IFW, Dresden, Germany. In all these places he extended his expertise in SSNMR in various facets.
Apart from being a researcher he was always involved in various public scientific outreach activities in a popular level. Apart from being an academician, he is a decent player in chess, table tennis and has lot of passion in traveling, philosophy, Bengali literature and Rabindrasangeet.
PhD, University of Florence
Vaishali Sharma has a PhD, in Structural Biology from Centre for Magnetic Resonance, University of Florence, Italy, which is one of the largest biophysics laboratories in Europe. Her studies were focused on proteins that are involved in iron metabolism and assimilation in humans. She studied the interaction of these macromolecules with deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and their consequential molecular cascading events.
Vaishali worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the laboratory of Cellular dynamics, Max Plank Institute of Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany and studied the alpha synuclein (ASN) protein, whose accumulation leads to neurodegeneration leading to Parkinson’s disease in humans. This group is a leader in making novel microscopes for studying complicated biological phenomena live. Her research was focused on the interactions of ASN with multiple neuronal proteins involved in cellular trafficking. The molecular events governing packaging and transporting of cellular cargo in and out of cell in rat model system. During her second post-doctoral research at University of Medicine, Gottingen in the Dept of Neurodegeneration, she was part of team involved in testing of proposed potential compounds and their interaction with ASN within cells. Her interdisciplinary research exposure gathered her expertise in cutting edge microscopy, biochemistry, molecular biology, cell biology and neurobiology.
Vaishali enjoys Teaching and Learning. She has an aptitude to learn new languages, she speaks Italian, German, Bengali, Punjabi in two dialects, Hindi and Bhojpuri, with varying degree of proficiency. She is an enthusiast in Latin American dance forms and Photography.
Venkat is an experimental physicist with research interests spanning across hard condensed matter physics, chemistry, and materials science disciplines. He is deeply engaged in studying matter at extreme pressures in order to discover new technologically relevant materials. He frequently collaborates with computational physicists and chemists for materials modelling and simulations. Other areas of interest include phononics using Raman light scattering spectroscopy, phonon-quasi particle interactions, and the study of metastable phases.
Venkat obtained his Masters degree in Physics from IIT Roorkee and PhD in Materials Science from JNCASR in Bangalore. After a short stint at Purdue University in West Lafayette as a visiting researcher, he did his postdoctoral studies at Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC and Sorbonne University in Paris.
He has mentored undergraduate interns during his PhD and postdoc tenures. He emphasizes on hands-on learning and took part in developing and teaching practical oriented courses for summer interns during his PhD. Outside academic life, he enjoys sports (TT, cricket, and badminton), travelling, gardening, and cooking.
Vidya Bharathi Rajkumar is an applied economist with research interests in the domains of Development and Agricultural Economics and Public Policy. Vidya received her Ph.D. in Applied Economics and Management from Cornell University. At Cornell, Vidya was a Tata-Cornell research scholar at the Tata Cornell Institute (TCI), an inter-disciplinary research group working on identifying solutions to agriculture and nutrition related problems in India. Prior to Cornell, Vidya was a Research Associate at J-PAL India.
Vidya’s research focuses on developmental questions in the context of India, and her doctoral research examines the impact of male migration and remittances on the women and children left behind in India’s agrarian areas. She is keen to pursue a research agenda examining the complex relationships connecting male migration, women’s empowerment in agriculture, and the resultant effects on agricultural productivity. Vidya is also interested in questions that examine the role of social and gender norms in governing women’s agency and employment in patriarchal societies.
Vidya is a trained Carnatic musician, and a former active member of the student-led SPICMACAY chapter at Cornell.
Vikash Pandey is a mathematical physicist and his research interests are quite interdisciplinary with a primary focus towards the physics of complex media and the resulting emergent power-law behavior. After receiving M.Sc degree in Physics from the Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, he worked as a geophysicist for a seismic company in the USA. Thereafter, he earned his PhD degree from the University of Oslo, Norway, in 2016. He did his postdoctoral research at the University of Oslo, and UiT, The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. His publications encompass the fields of mathematical physics, fractional calculus, acoustics, fractal geometry, viscoelasticity, non-Newtonian rheology, dielectrics, fluid mechanics, and nonlinear bubble dynamics. Identifying the underlying mechanism of observed physical phenomena and the ability to describe them with an appropriate mathematical formulation gives him an unmatched joy. His long term research goal is to extend the applications of fractional calculus to the conventional branches of physics such as quantum physics and cosmology.
In addition to the research, teaching has been an important part of his academic training. After his postdoctoral experience, he began his teaching career in India at the Ahmedabad University, Gujarat, followed by University of Petroleum & Energy Studies (UPES), Dehradun. He has worked enthusiastically and effectively with undergraduate and post-graduate students, and occasionally instructed doctoral candidates too. Following his passion towards teaching, he had served as a mentor in one of the massive open online courses (MOOC) offered by theUniversity of Rochester, USA, through Coursera. He had also been a student representative for the engineering acoustics committee of the Acoustical Society of America.
Further, he has been actively involved with the public outreach of scientific discoveries that could cultivate a more engaging and healthier societal-scientific participation. He believes such an outreach is necessary to cultivate scientific temper and critical thinking among the masses. Furthermore, when he is not doing science, he could be found either hiking and trekking in the wild, or, bird-watching. He also enjoys playing badminton, and motorcycling.
Vivek Radhakrishnan’s primary research areas are moral philosophy and history of philosophy. He received his PhD from Manipal University for his research on Kant’s moral philosophy. In his doctoral research titled “Kant’s Theory of Moral Motivation”, he argued for the inclusion of feeling as an essential motivational component within the rationalist Kantian ethical framework. For this project, he was awarded the Junior Research Fellowship by Indian Council of Philosophical Research (ICPR). After his PhD, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay. His current research focuses on the topics of moral judgment, moral reasoning and moral motivation from within the context of early modern philosophy. His broader research interests include normative ethics, meta-ethics, early modern European philosophy and Indian reception of modern European philosophy. He teaches courses on philosophical methods, modern European philosophy, philosophical ethics and metaphysics. Besides teaching and research, Vivek also translates classical works of philosophy into Tamil.
I am a mathematician working on analysis of partial differential equations. Specifically, I work in the theory of homogenization — the study of small-scale heterogeneities in physical models; and regularity theory of elliptic and parabolic equations which is about smoothness of solutions in different function spaces. My research is informed by ideas from physics and engineering and I wish to learn from and work with people in those disciplines.
I have a PhD from the Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in Mumbai. After my PhD, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Centre for Applicable Mathematics in Bengaluru.I am also interested in / would like to be interested in the philosophy of mathematics/science, reading books, cycling, music, computers, art.
Dr. Vinod Saranathan received his bachelors in Physics (cum laude) with a minor in Philosophy in 2004 from Ohio Wesleyan University, where he honed his life-long interest in ornithology and the liberal arts. Funded by a Dillon and Mary Ripley Graduate Fellowship, he earned his Master of Science in 2007 and a PhD in 2011 from Yale University, in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He was a Royal Society Newton Fellow at the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. At Oxford, he was elected to an Edward P. Abraham Cephalosporin Junior Research Fellowship at Linacre College. Prior to joining Krea University, he was faculty at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. Prof. Saranathan specialises in the study of structural colouration, responsible for vivid hues such as blues, violets and greens in both extant and extinct animals. His integrative research interests lie at the interface of evolutionary biology, soft matter physics, photonics, biomimetics and biomaterials engineering, a nascent field that he has termed “Evolutionary Photonics.” He has taught widely, from common curriculum modules (Quantitative Reasoning, Scientific Reasoning) to electives in Evolution, and Biophysics and looks forward to teaching in a top-notch liberal arts institution in India.
Yadugiri Tiruvaimozhi is an ecologist fascinated by plants and their interactions with things around them, especially plant associations with fungal and bacterial partners and enemies in the soil. The primary focus of my research is to understand the consequences of climate change and other anthropogenic stressors such as eutrophication and invasion on plant, microbial and other communities, their interactions, and ecosystem processes they mediate. He is also interested in exploring long-term ecological data to gain insights into various ecological communities, their functioning and responses to factors such as changing climate and land-use patterns. Her doctoral work at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, and post-doctoral work at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, IISc, focused on studying the impacts of global change on plant-microbial interactions using field-based experiments and observations in the Nilgiris in the Western Ghats and Spiti Valley in the Trans-Himalaya. Subsequently, as a Research Associate at the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), she contributed to synthesizing information on long-term ecological monitoring in India, and exploring ways to use NCF’s long-term ecological datasets to address fundamental questions spanning diverse ecosystems. She has also been a long-time student of Sanskrit, of both literary and technical works.