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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.
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.
PhD, Indian Institute of Technology – Madras
Abuthahir earned a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Anna University. After his undergraduate degree, he worked as a software engineer at Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTS) for five years. He then joined IIT Madras, where he completed his Masters of Science, by research, and then a PhD in the area of communication networks, from the Department of Electrical Engineering.
His modelling research interests are centered around the design and performance evaluation ofcongestion control mechanisms for large scale communication networks like the Internet. His research interests in applied mathematics include control theory, bifurcation theory, queuing systems with delayed feedback, and non-linear time-delay dynamical systems.
PhD, Rutgers University
Anannya Dasgupta has a PhD, in early modern English literature from Rutgers University, USA. As a graduate student, she trained in writing pedagogy at the Rutgers Writing Program. During her stint as an early modernist teaching Renaissance Literature, she noticed the disconnect between the writing abilities of college students versus the expectations of the college curriculum. To help bridge the gap, she started offering critical writing sessions to students, on an informal basis. Soon, this took the shape of official courses, with Dasgupta designing the curriculum and pedagogy and hiring/training teachers .
Determined to make the teaching of writing matter in the Indian higher education curriculum, she set up the Centre for Writing Studies at O.P. Jindal Global University in 2018. Apart from teaching undergraduate and post-graduate students, she also works with faculty in the social sciences and humanities to help them incorporate strategies from writing pedagogy in their class room teaching.
She participated in the EU funded “Project E-QUAL” (2014-2017) and produced, among other things, a critical writing course module for all the universities partnered under the project. The module is now available as an open access course on the Swayam platform. She won a grant to collaborate with the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University (2015-2017) and continues the collaboration to develop research for teaching writing. Her publications include articles on seventeenth-century English literature and pedagogy. Her book Magical Epistemologies: Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern English Drama is forthcoming. She has co-edited This Unsettled Place: A Critical Anthology of American Poetry and Short Stories (2014) and has published a book of poems Between Sure Places (2015). She is currently working on several collaborative projects in writing pedagogy. Her fiction, poetry and photo art have appeared online, and in magazines and anthologies.
PhD, Anthropology, Yale University
Aniket holds interest in science and technology studies, democratic politics, and agrarian studies and his research examines the ongoing controversy over genetically modified (GM) food crops in India. More broadly, Aniket work on questions of environmental justice, food democracy, and sustainable agriculture, with a focus on Maharashtra.
Aniket holds a PhD in Anthropology from Yale University and his doctoral thesis was awarded the 2016 Sardar Patel Best Dissertation Prize. This award, conferred by the University of California Los Angeles, goes to the best doctoral dissertation in the U.S.A. on any aspect of modern India across the fields of humanities, social sciences, fine arts and education. He also hold a B.Tech (Electronics & Electrical Communication Engineering) from IIT Kharagpur, and an MS (Business Research) from the University of Southern California.
Aniket has previously taught at Ashoka University and the School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and also worked with McKinsey & Company India and Texas Instruments India.
His research has been published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change, Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, while policy-oriented writings have appeared in The Hindu, Economic & Political Weekly, The Peoples’ Archive of Rural India, The India Forum, Article 14, and The Wire, among others. His article on pesticide marketing in Maharashtra was awarded the 2019-20 Krishna Bharadwaj-Eric Wolf Prize by the Journal of Peasant Studies. Aniket’s book titled Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic crops in Contemporary India will be published by Yale University Press in the coming months.
Aniket is especially keen to work with students from disadvantaged groups, including Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi students and students from rural backgrounds.
MPhil, Columbia University
Anil Srinivasan is an accomplished classical pianist, the first to be awarded the coveted Sangeet Natak Akademi youth award in 2010 for creative and experimental music, India’s national honour for musicians under 35. Anil’s various collaborative works – with several of India’s top artistes have come in for critical acclaim. Collaborators include U Srinivas, Ravikiran, Aruna Sairam, Unnikrishnan, Rakesh Chaurasia, Lalgudi Krishnan, Gaurav Mazumdar, Jayanthi Kumaresh and others. Anil is best known for his association with Sikkil Gurucharan, with whom he has produced ten highly popular albums. Anil has composed extensively for dance and theatre internationally working as far afield as Korea, Australia and the United States. Anil has been a TED speaker, chaired conferences on music in venues as diverse as Liverpool Hope University and the University of Mumbai and has represented India across multiple forums involving arts education.
With an MPhil from Columbia Business School and an MBA from the University of Southern California, Anil is also a popular speaker and a columnist for a wide variety of publications including The Hindu and The Indian Express. Previously, he has served as adjunct faculty at Mumbai’s SP Jain Institute of Management and Research.
Importantly, Anil is the founder of the “Rhapsody” music education initiative. This hugely successful programme takes the classic arts to schools, through a structured, systematic syllabi delivered through physical classroom learning and online support. Today, nearly 200,000 children across South India are part of Rhapsody. More specifically, it pioneers the idea of STEM learning using music and arts-based interventions.
In addition, Anil serves as a trustee of the NalandaWay Foundation, reaching children in difficult situations.
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]).
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.
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 Assistant 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.
Chitrangada Choudhury is Associate Professor of Practice of Environmental Studies & Public Policy. Her interests lie in environmental justice, policy & history; agro-ecology; democratic decentralization, social movements & transparency.
She has worked in the newsrooms of The Indian Express, The Hindustan Times & The Guardian US & been part of the founding editorial collective of The People’s Archive of Rural India. Her multimedia reportage has received multiple awards including the Sanskriti Award for Public-Interest Journalism (2008), the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award (2009) for Best Spot Reporting on the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, the Press Council of India’s National Award for Investigative Reporting (2015) for reportage on forest takeovers, and the Lorenzo Natali Journalism Prize (2010 & 2018) for reportage on the state-Maoist conflict in Chhattisgarh and farmer-conservators in Odisha.
Her research has appeared in edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals like ‘Capitalism, Nature, Socialism’ and ‘Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa & The Middle East’. She has held fellowships at Columbia University, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, the Open Society Institute and the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. She is currently an Editorial Board member of Article 14, and a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for World Environmental History, University of Sussex.
PhD, Pennsylvania State University
Dr. Gaurav Ghosh is an economist with research, policy development, and private sector consulting experience. Before Krea, he was a senior economist at EY, the consulting firm. Before EY, he was a post-doctoral researcher at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. He has a PhD from Pennsylvania State University, an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a B.A. from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai.
In recent consulting assignments, Dr. Ghosh has consulted with central government ministries on the impact of taxes on the Indian economy in diverse contexts. He has also set up a behavioral economics practice and consulted widely on the transfer pricing of financial transactions within MNCs. Other projects have delved into inter alia antitrust, the valuation of intellectual property, and asset-backed securitizations.
Energy and the environment have been constant themes in Dr. Gaurav Ghosh’s non-consulting research. He has investigated topics in this area using surveys, experiments, concepts from behavioral economics, and a variety of econometric methods. One strand of research focuses on consumer demand for energy and energy-related products, with the intent of understanding divergences between stated and revealed preferences, and designing nudges towards higher adoption of environmentally friendly technologies. Other strands have looked into the design and testing of emissions trading markets under stochasticity, and the valuation of air pollution using hedonic methods.
Over the years, Dr. Gaurav Ghosh has spoken at conferences and venues around the world and published papers in refereed journals. He has also written extensively in the financial papers on topics ranging from financial crises, through energy economics and negotiation strategies, to bitcoin.
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.
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, Manipal University
Kalpita Bhar Paul brings a formidable combination of academic and field experience to Krea University. Her post doctoral stint was at IIT Bombay and her broad research interest lies in philosophically engaging with the nature—human relationship. Through her course of study and field work, she has strived to develop a phenomenological understanding of the human—environment relationship and delineate its import for environmental ethics/philosophy.
Kalpita has research interests in Environmental Philosophy, Ethics, Phenomenology, Heidegger’s Philosophy, Engaged Philosophy. Her teaching areas include Environmental Humanities, Philosophy and Ethics.
She has a PhD in Environmental Humanities from the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, MAHE. Her doctoral research revolved around giving primacy to the relationship instead of the human or the eco-system while developing ethics towards the environment. She philosophically engaged with the Sundarbans islander’s phenomenological understanding of the risk perception, vulnerability, and the notion of environmental crisis, and her dissertation demonstrated how an effective ethics towards the environment can be crafted out. This engaged philosophical mode of inquiry gives her a unique vantage point to engage with real-world challenges and focus on illustrating why philosophy is necessary in today’s day and age. She has published widely in international journals such as Environmental Ethics, Environmental Philosophy, International Journal of Applied Philosophy, Ethics & the Environment, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, etc. Kalpita has extensive field experience in the area of sustainable development and natural resource management. From 2008-2011, she worked for the Development Research Communication Services Centre, an NGDO in West Bengal. She was responsible for supervising several projects on sustainable natural resource management, climate change adaptation, rural livelihoods, and strengthening self-help groups.
Before doing her PhD, she was a teacher at an alternative residential school, Pathashaala, (Tamil Nadu) run by the Krishnamurti Foundation India. At this school, she explored a sustainable and environment-friendly community-based way of living by actively applying her learning from the Eco-village Design Education course at Wongsanit Ashram, Thailand (2011). At present, she is collaboratively working on an documentary project on the Sundarbans also writing her book titled ‘The Thirsty Land: An Engaged-Philosophical Review of the Sundarbans Crisis’.
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.
PhD, Victoria University
The focus of Dr Nazima Parveen’s work has been the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, communalisation of space and the politics of urban transformation in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Her book, Contested Homelands: Politics of Space and Identity (Bloomsbury, 2021) is an outcome of these intellectual engagements.
Parveen completed her PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She has worked as an assistant professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Dr Nazima Parveen has also worked in the Third Sector as lead researcher on different government and international funded research programmes in the UK, India and Nepal since 2002. She was the recipient of ICSSR post-doctoral fellowship 2018, Royal Society of New Zealand Doctoral Scholarship 2013–2016, ICSSR-CSDS Doctoral Fellowship Programme 2010–2012 and the ASIA Fellows Awards 2008–2009. She also writes opinion pieces on current affairs for digital news portals.
Panchali Ray is Senior Assistant 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.
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.
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.
Dr. Randhir earned his BSc in Chemistry (Hons.) degree from St. Edmund’s College, North Eastern Hills University, Shillong. He completed his Masters of Science in chemistry and Ph.D. in the area of copper-based nano-materials from IIT Madras. His areas of interest are synthesis and applications of nanomaterials and waste management.
Dr. Randhir Rai had developed a new concept for the prevention of potable water from aerial microbial contamination. After his thesis submission, he worked temporarily as a project officer at the department of civil engineering, IIT Madras.
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.
Dr. Rohit Kumar obtained his Diploma in Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) from the Uttaranchal Board of Technical Education, Roorkee (UBTER), in 2003. He received the B.Tech. degree in CSE from Uttar Pradesh Technical University (UPTU), Lucknow, in 2009, and M.Tech. degree in CSE from the Atal Bihari Vajpayee – Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management (ABV-IIITM), MP, in 2014. Subsequently, He worked as a full-time Ph.D. research scholar in the CSE department at Dr. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee – International Institute of Information Technology (DSPM-IIITNR) from 2017-2021.
In 2010, he joined the department of CSE at Govt. Polytechnic Mallasalam, Almora, as a Lecturer. After that, he moved to Dehradun and joined Shivalik College of Engineering (SCE). Later, he joined Priyadarshini Institute of Engineering and Technology (PIET), Nagpur, in the capacity of Assistant Professor in 2015. His current research interests include Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Internet of Things (IoT), Industry 4.0, and Wireless Networks. Currently, Dr. Rohit Kumar is a member of some well-known scientific and research communities including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Computer Society of India (CSI), Indian Society for Technical Education (ISTE), etc.
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).
MPhil in English, Delhi University
Sameer Abraham Thomas has an MPhil in English Literature from the University of Delhi. He received his MA in English Literature from Shiv Nadar University where he also served as an academic writing tutor. He has been published in Café Dissensus, KashmirINK, and Looking Back: The 1947 Partition of India, 70 Years On, edited by Rakshanda Jalil, Tarun Saint, Debjani Sengupta(Orient BlackSwan, 2017). He has also worked as a freelance copy-editor and content writer, and as a research assistant at Shiv Nadar University.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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).
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Soumyajit straddles action and academic research with more than 14 years of experience (both volunteering and full time) of working with various environmental and sustainability issues. He has earned a PhD in Sustainability Studies (specialization in Ecological Economics) from Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) as part of a unique interdisciplinary PhD program (2021). His dissertation attempts to understand socio-psychological drivers as well as local and regional scale environmental impacts of conspicuous/luxury consumption basket in India. Soumyajit has an engineering bachelor’s in Computer Science and Engineering and a Master’s with a gold medal in Environment and Development from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He attended Thor Heyerdahl Summer School on The Green Economy at NMBU, Norway, and also presented his work at the 11th International Conference of the European Society for Ecological Economics (ESEE) on Transformations.
He has diverse work experience, ranging from conducting action research in Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource management to teaching in an alternative school run by the Krishnamurti Foundation of India to working as a research fellow at LEAD at Krea University and teaching at Terra.do – an online global climate school.
Soumyajit is furthering postdoctoral research at the intersection of rising consumerism, sustainability concerns, and inequality levels in the context of the Global South. He has published in international journals such as the journal of Indian Society for Ecological Economics, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, and popular media houses like The Wire, Mongabay, The Telegraph (forthcoming), etc. He is an active member of a working group under Future Earth’s Knowledge-Action Network for Systems of Sustainable consumption and production, and also part of the Sustainability Transitions Research Network.
Soumyajit is also interested in larger questions of philosophy and ethics, particularly pertaining to environmental issues.
Dr. Pavan Kumar Perepu received both M.Tech and Ph.D in Computer Science from University of Hyderabad, India. His research areas of interest are Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning, Image Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Information Retrieval, Computer Vision and Algorithms. He has published 10 papers in reputed journals and conference proceedings like Neurocomputing, Elsevier, Parallel Processing Letters, World Scientific, Pattern Analysis and Applications, Springer, IEEE ICDAR, ACM ICVGIP etc. He has six years Post-PhD teaching and research experience at places like IISc Bangalore, IIITDM Kurnool and IIT Jammu.