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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.
Chiranjib started his professional journey as a physicist and later turned into a computer scientist. In his career spanning more than 20 years in academia and industrial R&D, Chiranjib has worked in various fields of scientific computing, applied mathematics, computer science, high-performance computing, and scalable AI. He has 3 granted patents and 50+ international publications in different international scientific journals, books, and conference proceedings. He also serves the editorial board as review editor of a few scientific journals in the field of computational physics and computer science. As a chairperson, he leads the IEEE International Conference on High-Performance Computing, Data, and Analytics (www.hipc.org) since 2017. He serves many other top-ranked conferences in their program committee and advisory boards. He is the 2003 recipient of the ” ISCA Young Scientist Award” from the Indian Science Congress Association. His biography is listed in Marquis and International Who’s Who publications. He is a member of the technical committee for parallel processing (TCPP) of the IEEE Computer Society, Indian Science Congress Association (ISCA), the American Physical Society (APS), ACM, Society of petroleum engineers (SPE), and a senior member of IEEE. After spending many years at the high-performance computing lab at IBM, Bangalore, the Ohio State University, USA, and the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore, he has been working from Shell since November 2012. Currently, he is working for Shell as the Head of Engineering, Scientific Simulations. He is an award-winning wildlife photographer and an avid blogger/writer.
Dr Govindarajan holds a Masters in Physics from the Madras Christian College and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the Madras University. He has been associated with IIT Kanpur, The Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Chennai Mathematical Institute. He was a Senior Research Associate of ASICTP, Trieste, Italy, and a Visiting Professor/ Scientist at the University of Texas, Austin, Syracuse University, NY, Max Planck Institute, Potsdam Germany, DIAS, Dublin and Sao Paulo University, Brazil.
His interests are mathematical aspects of quantum theory, quantum field theory, noncommutative geometry and gravity. He has over 100 research publications and edited special volumes. He was associated with the Tamil Nadu Science Forum (TNSF) from its beginning, and he was involved in popularising sciences. He is currently an editor of the journal “Physics Education” of the Indian Association for Physics Teachers. He served as Dean in the Homi Bhabha National Institute at IMSc. He was also an Advisor to the Theoretical Physics group of the S N Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Kolkata.
JaideepHardikar is a Nagpur-based independent journalist, researcher and writer – and an avid story lover. In his career spanning nearly 26 years, he has worked with several English newspapers, including The Telegraph as their Central India correspondent. He is currently a Core Team member and Roving Reporter with the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) founded by P Sainath.He is a former Fellow at the Mumbai School of Economics and Public Policy, where he engaged with the project between VIDC and MSEPP on setting up and strengthening of the water users associations in the command areas of Gosekhurd and Lower Wardha irrigation projects.A former Asia Leadership Fellow at Tokyo, Japan, (2015) and Alfred Friendly Press Fellow in 2009 during which he worked with Sun Sentinel newspaper in South Florida, he has been a winner of coveted national and international awards and fellowships, including the Prem Bhatia memorial award and Sanskriti Award for Journalism. Widely travelled, Hardikar’s journalism appears in many national and international publications, in print and digital forms, including BBC/Southasia, Scientific American, Livemint, The Hindu Businessline, The Wire, and The Telegraph, among others.His interests range from agrarian economy to Commons to collectives and international affairs. He is a visiting faculty at several journalism schools in India and is associated with the Asia Center at the Monash University, Australia, as a researcher under Emeritus Professor Antonia Marika Vicziany. He has a Master’s in Sociology and a post graduate degree in Mass Communication.
He is the author of two books. ‘Ramrao – the story of India’s agrarian crisis was published in August 2021 by Harper Collins. His first book, ‘A village awaits doomsday’ (Penguin, India, 2013), looked at the life of people displaced by development projects in India. In 2021, he received the New India Foundation fellowship to research his next book, the Empress of Central India – the first Tata venture and its profound impact on Nagpur.
PhD, Vanderbilt University
Viswanathan’s research interests have spanned the areas of molecular conformations and weak non-covalent interactions, particularly the hydrogen bonding interactions, which pervades through all of chemistry, physics and biology. Matrix isolation spectroscopy, a method where isolated molecules are trapped in a cryogenic solid inert gas matrix, was the experimental technique used for these studies. The trapped molecules were then probed using infrared spectroscopy. The experimental results were corroborated using ab initio quantum chemical computations. These studies resulted in a detailed understanding of the structure and energetics of hydrogen bonded complexes. Recent studies of his group on conformations of amino acids, an important class of biomolecules, revealed a very interesting and restrictive structural preference that these molecules adopt, with respect to their backbone, comprising of the COOH and NH2 moieties. In addition, his research group has also been interested in lanthanide fluorescence, specifically to develop methods for the enhancement of fluorescence in an attempt to develop sensitive analytical methods. Enhancement of fluorescence by a factor of over 10,000 was achieved by choosing appropriate ligands as energy transfer agents. He has also been interested in the use of mass spectroscopy for analytical applications.
He subscribes to the adage that research and teaching must coexist since there is a definite synergy between the two. At IISER, Mohali, he enjoyed teaching courses at all levels – from introductory to the advanced, with each level presenting its own challenges. He has also coordinated a number of summer science programmes for school and university students. It is also his conviction that courses in universities must not be restricted to just learning; there must be a small component where students get to teach during their final years.
While it is important for students to study well, he believes it is also important for them not just to study well, but have multiple interests apart from their major area of study, for a wholesome growth. He has practiced this philosophy himself. Apart from teaching and research, he is interested in sports and music. He is an avid player of cricket, tennis and table-tennis and enjoys music.
Representative publications and books;
Kaveri Bharath, is a potter, ceramic artist, and teacher, based in Madras (Chennai), with 25+ years of experience in making and teaching ceramics. She received the bulk of her training in handcrafted, functional stoneware and wood fired ceramics, from Ray Meeker and Deborah Smith, (Golden Bridge Pottery, Pondicherry). She has taught clay work, pottery, sculpture, glaze chemistry, kiln building, and firing methods, for over 2 decades. She has been visiting faculty for Ceramics at NID, Ahmedabad, from 2013 to 2022. Kaveri has also set up studios, kilns and workspaces, including setting up the processes, sourcing of materials, and, in some cases, (like that of The Spastics’ Society of Tamilnadu), also designed and developed products for the institutions. She has curated shows of other contemporary ceramic artists, in galleries in Chennai, as well as exhibited her own sculptural work at galleries in Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata, and New Delhi. She has sold her functional ware in shops and more recently, during the pandemic lockdowns, online. Although now primarily working in functional, utilitarian ceramics, Kaveri has also explored installations and sculptural art. Her influences and interests range from theatre and art, to language, adolescent health, and even herpetology! She sincerely believes that nothing is really a “distraction”, and that if we let our interests and curiosity lead us, what we find/learn will only enrich and add to our core work. Working with the Global Arts at Krea, she hopes to bring in interaction with experts working in a variety of media, and through the courses that she teaches, she hopes to showcase the interwovenness of art, craft, mathematics, design, science, and the joy of working with one’s own hands, that is intrinsic to ceramics. She is keen to ensure that students are equipped with practical skills and hands-on, tactile creativity, for a life beyond theoretical academia.
Mitaja Chakraborty has a PhD in Sociology from University of Hyderabad. Her PhD thesis looks at the garment workers’ struggles in the postcolonial globalising economy of Bangladesh. It looks at the interlinked discourses on development, empowerment and labour rights by the state, brands and owners and local activist networks. Her thesis locates the political subjectivity that emerges within the factory floors as well as in everyday spaces as central to the framing of demands and the conflicts and overlaps between the local and international activist networks. She has been a postdoctoral research associate at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali. At IISER Mohali, she has worked in a DST project titled “Gender Advancement in Transforming Institutions – GATI” in collaboration with University College London where she has undertaken extensive research on gender in STEMM institutions that culminated into a self assessment application report for IISER Mohali. She has received an ICSSR travel grant in 2019. She has presented her doctoral work in several national and international conferences. Her research interests include labour process, labour theory, feminist research methodologies, gendered labour and activism and transnational network studies.
MPhil, Delhi University
Mukund Padmanabhan was the Editor of The Hindu between March 2016 and the end of February 2019. Earlier, he was the Editor of The Hindu Businessline from 2016 onwards. Mukund is an M-Phil in Philosophy and worked briefly as a lecturer in University of Delhi before switching to journalism. He is interested in and has written about politics, legal affairs, and literature. Before joining The Hindu group in 1997, he had worked with Sunday Magazine in Kolkata and the Indian Express in Chennai.
He was an adjunct faculty of the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, where he taught credits on media law and advanced writing to post-graduate students. He curated two festivals of theatre and music — The Hindu Theatre Fest, and The Hindu November Fest — on behalf his newspaper group, events which have been conducted in Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and other South Indian cities since 2005. He also curated an annual thought conclave on behalf of the newspaper called The Huddle, which is held in Bengaluru
Mullai Thiagu has research interests in areas of computational thinking, digital systems, VLSI & Embedded Systems, image processing and High-performance computing. She completed her undergraduate programme in Electronics and Communication at Saranathan College of Engineering, Tiruchirappalli and post-graduation in Government College of Technology, Coimbatore. She began her career at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Indian Space Research Organization, Sriharikota as Scientist/Engineer-SC. She has hands-on experience towards establishment of measurement and instrumentation systems for the S200 solid propellant production facility of the rocket motor. Subsequently she also worked as a design engineer in industry where she was involved in multiple projects aimed towards design, development, integration cum board-level testing of system level solutions using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Later, she was involved in capacity building at NIELIT, Chennai, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) as Scientist/Engineer-SC responsible for establishment of lab infrastructure, curriculum design, conduction of industry relevant courses as well as industry and academic collaborations. Her current doctoral research work at IIT Madras focuses on real-time measurement of an object subjected to deformation by accelerating the computation speed of an image processing algorithm powered by Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).
MSc, London School of Economics
Prayaag Akbar is the author of a critically-acclaimed work of fiction, Leila. His novel, published early in 2017, won the Crossword Jury Prize and the Tata Lit Live! First Book Award and was shortlisted for the Hindu Prize for Best Fiction and the Shakti Bhatt Award. It was developed into a series by Netflix, directed by Deepa Mehta. In July 2018, a new edition was released in the United Kingdom and a number of other territories.
Prayaag has worked as a journalist in a number of leading Indian publications. He was a consulting editor with Mint, a leading Indian financial newspaper, and before that was the deputy editor of the news website Scroll, where he was an early member of the team.
Randhir Did his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. During PhD, he developed a new technique for the prevention of potable water from aerial water contamination. From August 2021 to August 2023, he worked at Krea University as a post-doctoral fellow, and conducted all his research projects independently without any mentor. During his postdoctoral tenure at Krea he also gave Industrial consultancy service to “Aten Energy Infrastructure Pvt. Ltd” Kolkata and solved their contamination-related issue in dioctyl phthalate (DOP). His area of research includes (1) synthesis and application of nanomaterials and (2) waste management.
Dr. Shanti Pappu, is the founder/secretary, Sharma Centre for Heritage Education (SCHE), India and a former Professor of Prehistory at the Deccan College, Pune, India. She founded the Sharma Centre for Heritage Education in 1999, and along with Dr. Kumar Akhilesh has been conducting research programs, training courses and public outreach programs for children and teachers in archaeology and associated sciences. For over 20 years, her team has been investigating aspects of early prehistoric occupation of South Asia, through multidisciplinary efforts, involving excavations at the site of Attirampakkam and Sendrayanpalayam, and studies across parts of northern and southern Tamil Nadu. These projects include establishing and coordinating teams of scientists from India, and abroad, facilitating collaborative networks to address questions related to India’s prehistoric past, through intertwined approaches in archaeology, geomorphology, palaeoenvironments, geochronology, remote sensing, and ethnoarchaeology. She has published research papers in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature and Science, a book, and is currently editing a three-volume series on the prehistoric archaeology of Tamil Nadu. She is also interested in the history of prehistoric research in India, and is currently investigating the life and work of 19th century prehistorians in India.
Shilpi received her MS and Ph.D. from Purdue University, USA, her M.A. from Calcutta University and Bachelor’s in Sociology from Presidency College, Calcutta. Across two decades, Shilpi studied the comparative states of mysticism and madness, Buddhism, environmental values and scientists, creativity, and for her dissertation focused on how a teacher could be a creative, atypical deviant. Shilpi thoroughly enjoyed teaching undergraduates. She found teaching Introductory courses, which explored questions related to freedom and determinism with examples drawn from popular literature (whether PG Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry or Tagore), music (whether U2, a piece by Beethoven or Ravi Shankar) and films (whether My Cousin Vinny, Billy Eliot or Saving Private Ryan) as especially enjoyable. She has left the sunny pastures of academia to venture into other fields. She has worked as a career consultant, a workshop facilitator, a researcher at a non-profit – and most recently, as an editor of children’s books at Katha. After a hiatus thus from academia, Shilpi returns to teach undergraduates at Krea University with enthusiasm and hope.
Sonia Ghalian is an interdisciplinary scholar of film, literature, media, and cultural studies. She is currently working as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Division of Literature and Arts at Krea University in India. With a strong focus on Indian cinema, she is writing her manuscript titled “Contours of Children and Childhood in Indian Cinema,” which has been accepted for publication by Orient Blackswan. This work delves into multiple facets of the children’s cinema genre, encompassing the industry as well as the prevalent themes surrounding the portrayal of children and the construction of childhood in contemporary Indian cinema. Prior to her current position, Sonia was teaching at the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Christ University Bangalore for close to three years. She was the recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship in 2017, which facilitated her short-term visit to the Centre for Research in Arts, Creativity, and Literacy (CRACL) at Nottingham University, England. She has presented her work at various national and international conferences, including the University of Oxford in the UK and Science Po in Paris. Her research interests are Digital Cultures and Technology, Indian Cinema Studies, Gender & Cinema and 20th-Century Literature and the Arts.
Ph.D. National University of Singapore (Dept. of Communications and New Media)
Srikumar’s interests lie in the nexus between art and computing. His got his masters through a research programme at (what was then) the digital media lab at Kent Ridge Digital Labs, NUS, where his work was on real-time interactive music composition tools. He subsequently worked on the core tech team at muvee Technologies, a startup founded largely by the research team at KRDL which makes automatic music video production tools for non-professionals. At muvee, he created “muSE” a programming language and system for creating music video editing styles. He then returned to his roots as a veena player in the Carnatic tradition and worked on computational modeling of gamakas of Carnatic music for his Ph.D. After returning to India around 2013, he created Patantara – a service for publishing high quality Carnatic music notation and learning aids that serves students and academics. He later served as director of technology at Pramati Technologies, leading “Imaginea Labs” developing capability in diverse tech areas such as data science and machine learning, augmented and virtual reality design and blockchain tech. Apart from music tech, his interests include programming language design, functional programming techniques, audio-visual computation and language centred software design.
He’s contributed to several patents while at muvee. Some of his publications are –
The Viability of the Web Browser as a Computer Music Platform
Nov 30, 2013, Computer Music Journal
A Two-component Representation for Modeling Gamakas of Carnatic Music
Jul 13, 2012, Proc. of the 2nd CompMusic Workshop (Istanbul, Turkey)
Modeling Speed Doubling in Carnatic Music
Aug 5, 2011, Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference 2011, University of Huddersfield, UK
Dr. Sudip Roy has 19 years of experience in research and innovation. He has worked in the oil and gas, energy (Shell R&D), pharmaceutical sectors (Akamara Biomedicine), and semiconductor industry (Intel). He started his career as an academician and worked as a scientist at the CSIR- National Chemical Laboratory in Pune where he led and guided a group of Ph.D. students and worked on several industrial and government-funded projects in computational chemistry and materials science. He is a co-founder of a company (Prescience Insilico Pvt. Ltd.) working in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML)-based methodologies for highly selective drugs and materials design. Dr. Roy obtained his Ph.D. in chemical sciences from the University of Saarland in Germany followed by post-doctoral work at Technical University Darmstadt, Germany. He is a Chevening fellow 2019 and studied management of research, science, and innovation at the University of Oxford, UK
Suryodaya Sharma is a doctoral candidate in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He is a senior research fellow with University Grants Commission (UGC-SRF). Earlier, he attended Keele University, United Kingdom as a visiting fellow supported by UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI). He has received his education from University of Delhi and Banaras Hindu University. His primary area of interest is the intersection of prejudice, legitimation and oppression. Specifically, how social inequalities may be naturalised and reproduced in modern and democratic societies. His doctoral project examines the psychological underpinnings of persistence of caste in Indian society in a mixed-method enquiry. He is also involved in many projects with foci ranging from hate speech through memes, identity entrepreneurship by majoritarian leadership and humiliation in Hindu-Muslim relations in Indian society. He seeks to answer complicated questions of social inequalities by exploring the interrelationships between psychological processes and socio-political contexts.
PhD, University of Illinois
Swarna Rajagopalan trained as a political scientist, works as an independent scholar, consultant and writer and founded and runs The Prajnya Trust. Her research interests relate to security, politics and gender. She writes regularly for both academic projects and general publications. She has taught politics and international relations at the University of Illinois, Michigan State University and Yale University, in addition to having taught at Sophia College, Mumbai and more recently, at the National Management School’s India campus for Broward University. Swarna’s consultancy work has included academic projects, from conceptualising and organising academic conferences to hosting and co-directing a summer study abroad programme for Michigan State in Chennai for two years. Prajnya works broadly towards gender equality and peace; her work at Prajnya combines all of these elements with training, advocacy, network and capacity-building in the social sector. In addition, Swarna is a founding member of the Women’s Regional Network, a network of women peace activists from Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka.
MA, Harvard University
The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi is an innovative thinker, philosopher, educator and a polymath monk. He is the Director of the Ethics Initiative at the MIT Media Lab and the president & CEO of The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Center is a collaborative and nonpartisan think tank, and its programmes emphasise responsibility and examine meaningfulness and moral purpose between individuals, organisations, and societies. Six Nobel Peace Laureates serve as its founding members and its programmes run in several countries and are expanding.
Venerable Tenzin’s unusual background encompasses entering a Buddhist monastery at the age of ten and receiving graduate education at Harvard University with degrees ranging from Philosophy to Physics to International Relations. He is a Tribeca Disruptive Fellow and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
Venerable Tenzin serves on the boards of a number of academic, humanitarian, and religious organisations. He is the recipient of several recognitions and awards, and received Harvard’s Distinguished Alumni Honors for his visionary contributions to humanity.
Dr. C S Yogananda got his B.Sc., M.Sc.(Mathematics) degrees from Bangalore Univ. He obtained his Ph.D. (Mathematics ) in 1990 from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, (University of Madras), working under the guidance of the renowned number theorist, Prof. R. Balasubramanian. After his Ph.D, he spent two years in the Panjab Univ., Chandigarh. Dr. Yogananda’s research interests are in the areas of number theory, especially, algebraic number theory, modular forms and elliptic curves. He is interested in mathematics teaching at all levels – scool to advanced level. He was active in the Mathematical Olympiad programme in India from 1989 – 2003 and was involved in the training and selection of the Indian team to International Math Olympiads. In 2005 he moved to Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering, Mysore to pursue his passion for teaching in the Undergraduate programme. He is very interested in the interface of Mathematics and Technology and has contributed to many IT tools for Indian languages. He is involved in the creation and maintenance of the portals: Advaitasharada.sringeri.net and kymyogavaisharadi.in, among many such archives. He was a founder editor of Samasya, a triannual journal for school students and was a member of the Editorial Board of Resonance, a journal for Science education published from the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore. He is the author of several research and survey articles in various journals. Besides Mathematics, he is interested in classical music and mountaineering.