Ashoka-Data Science for Social Impact Programme

Dr. Rudrangshu Mukherjee
Chancellor, Professor of History, Ashoka University
D. Phil. Oxford University

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Dr. Madhavi Menon
Professor of English, Ashoka University
Director, Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality
Director of the Ph. D. Programme in English
Ph. D. Tufts University

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Dr. Rita Kothari
Professor of English, Ashoka University
Director, MA in English Programme
PhD, Gujarat University

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Dr. Sunil Khilnani
Professor of Politics and History, Ashoka University
Ph.D. Cambridge University

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Diksha Radhakrishnan
Deputy Director, CSBC

Diksha Radhakrishnan is the Deputy Director at the Centre for Social & Behavioural Change, leading the Centre’s Behavioural Design & Impact Lab.
Previously, she served as CSBC’s Founding Lead for the establishment of the Behavioural Insights Unit at NITI Aayog, where she led the delivery of multiple high-stakes behaviourally-driven projects for the Government, including a communication campaign to promote mask-wearing, SBCC component for PM’s rural transformation initiative in Varanasi and generation of evidence-driven solutions for improving nutritional practices in rural communities (complementary feeding and IFA supplementation).
Diksha has extensive experience in the domain of applied behavioural research, at-scale program design, and operating in the public health landscape.
She has previously worked at Evidence Action Kenya, responsible for identifying, designing and scaling evidence-based solutions with government partners, across countries in East Africa and South Asia. She also served as a Research & Training Manager at J-PAL South Asia on multiple public health evaluations, working closely with senior academics and with high-ranking bureaucrats from state governments of Haryana, Tamil Nadu, and Bihar. She holds an MSc. in Development Studies from the School of Oriental & African Studies, the University of London and a B.A. in Political Science from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University.

Dr. Sanna Balsari-Palsule
Asst. Professor, Ashoka University
PhD, University of Cambridge

Dr. Sanna Balsari-Palsule is behavioural scientist and Associate Professor at Ashoka University. Prior to this, Sanna held teaching positions at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Sanna’s research interests include the dynamics of behavioural change. Her work has been published by peer-reviewed journals and covered in multiple media outlets including the BBC, and New York Magazine. She is a columnist for Psychology Today, Fast Company and Inc. She delivers regular training and workshops on the application of behavioural science to enable human flourishing. She is also a co-founder of a personality-based assessment tool, and the author of a set of personality notebooks. Sanna received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and her MPhil also from the University of Cambridge.

Dr. Pavan Mamidi 
Director, CSBC
PhD, University of Oxford

Dr. Pavan Mamidi is the director of the Centre for Social and Behavioural Change (CSBC) at Ashoka University, a preeminent research and practice center that applies behavioral economics and other behavioral sciences to improve living standards for low-income and marginalized members of society. Prior to this, Pavan served as director of the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS Nuffield-Flame), where he founded Oxford University’s behavioral/experimental lab in collaboration with FLAME University in Pune. The lab is dedicated to research on human decision-making. An alumnus of Harvard Law School and the University of Oxford, Pavan Mamidi has previously worked with the Solicitor-General of India in the Supreme Court. He has taught at several leading institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Management, Ahmedabad and Bangalore, and the University of Michigan Law School.

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Pooja Haldea
Senior Advisor, CSBC

Pooja Haldea is a Senior Advisor at the Centre for Social and Behavioural Change, Ashoka University. Pooja is an expert in the area of applied behavioural science, especially in public health, nutrition, data privacy and financial inclusion. She advises both social sector as well as private sector organisations on how to use behavioural science for greater impact. She helped set up the Centre and led the Centre’s effort to put in place the first Behavioural Insights Unit (Nudge Unit) within the Indian government. She leads the Centre’s work on financial inclusion and data privacy.
Pooja combines her social sector experience with deep private sector expertise. Pooja has worked for over a decade for McKinsey & Co. across India and Europe, where she was a Junior Partner in the Marketing and Sales practice. She then set up and ran the India office for BrainJuicer (now System 1), a global consulting firm widely acknowledged to be a thought leader in behavioural science-based research and marketing. At Brainjuicer, she led over 150 projects in India.
Pooja has an MBA from IIM Bangalore and a Bachelor’s in Mathematics from St. Stephen’s College in Delhi.

Sneha Shashidhara
Senior Research Consultant, CSBC

Sneha Shashidhara is a senior research consultant at the Centre for Social and Behavioural Change, with a teaching position at the Psychology Department of Ashoka University. She is a cognitive neuroscientist by training working as a researcher studying mechanisms of the brain underlying higher-order cognition and decision making, with an interest in the interaction between cognition and social psychology. A Gates-Cambridge scholar, she did her PhD, studying the multiple demand network in the brain, at the University of Cambridge. This network is active in different demands, be it language, memory, math etc and handles many types of task difficulty. Prior to that, she did her Master’s in Neuroscience at International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS), Goettingen, Germany.

Purnima Mehrotra
Leads Measurement & Learning Vertical, CSBC

Purnima Mehrotra leads Measurement & Learning across various projects at the CSBC. She is also the lead on capacity-building programs in behavioural change for professionals and government personnel. She draws on her background in development communication, advertising, communication pedagogy, capacity building and evaluation research to fulfil her mandate at CSBC.
Currently, she is working with several partners in the entertainment-education domain to systematize concept testing, monitoring and feedback loops, impact evaluation, documentation and dissemination, such that content creation becomes evidence-driven with clear behavioural indicators as benchmarks of assessment. She is also working in partnership with key academic partners on developing a multi-disciplinary curriculum in behavioural change. Previously, Purnima was with UNICEF in the Communication for Development division, where she worked on the development and evaluation of a social and behavioural change communication strategy for maternal, infant and young child nutrition. Before UNICEF, Purnima was a Senior Researcher at the Population Council, where she led multi-year projects on evaluating a community mobilisation effort to improve RMNCH behaviours among most marginalized women and assessing the programmatic success of government schemes-related incentive payments directly to beneficiaries. Purnima has also taught graduate and undergraduate courses in communication and research methodology at the University of Kentucky and the University of Connecticut. She obtained her PhD in Communication from the University of Kentucky, USA and a post-graduate diploma in marketing communication from MICA, Ahmedabad.

Sharon Barnhardt
Director-Research, CSBC

Sharon Barnhardt is the Director – Research at the Centre for Social and Behavioural Change at Ashoka University. She is an applied development economist and behavioural scientist who uses experiments to study policy-relevant topics in India. Her behavioural research focuses on sanitation and malnutrition.
Sharon is also active in Executive Education for the policy sector, having taught Behavioural Economics at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration and program evaluation with J-PAL South Asia and CLEAR.
She is a Faculty Affiliate at the Jameel Abdul Latif Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA, Bonn). Her experience includes positions at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (Nuffield College’s lab in India), the Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad, IFMR Business School (at Krea University), the World Bank, and J.P. Morgan.
Sharon’s academic record comprises a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an M.P.A. from Princeton University, and a Bachelor’s from NYU.

Gautam Patel
Lead, State BIUs & Deputy Director, CSBC

Gautam Patel has worked with governments for many years, most recently with J-PAL South Asia, where he led partnerships with several state governments for evidence to be used to inform policy and to support scale-ups in government systems. Prior to joining J-PAL South Asia, Gautam worked for four years in the Chief Minister’s Office in Gujarat, and before that, in the Chief Minister’s Office in Rajasthan. Before settling in India, he worked for the government in the UK for education reform for 14-19-year-olds in Oxfordshire and at a youth club as a trained youth worker in the evenings. Gautam graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2007 with a Master’s of Development Management and a concentration in India’s development, history, and politics. He also holds a Master’s in Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry from Oxford University (2003). Gautam enjoys running, origami, volunteering in the local community to support children to learn, and perhaps most of all playing to learn with his daughter.

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Arindam Chakrabarti

Arindam Chakrabarti is an internationally-renowned scholar in Indian Philosophy, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Art, Buddhism, and Philosophy of Language. He is Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Ashoka University and Lenney Distinguished Professor of Comparative Philosophy of Mind at University of Hawaii Manoa.

He is the author or editor of 12 books in English, Bengali and Sanskrit and more than 100 research papers. Besides that, he has published ‘Denying Existence’ on the logic of singular negative existentials (Synthese Library Series in 1997), edited the Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art (2016), and published seven collections of philosophical essays in Bangla, including “Thoughts on Food and Clothing” (2014) and “E Tonu Bhoriyaa: Philosophy of the Body and Illness”. He authored the first Sanskrit monograph on contemporary Western Epistemology in 2005. In 2019, the old Sanskrit College University of Kolkata awarded him the highest traditional title of “Mahamahopadhyaya”.

He earned his BA from Presidency College, Calcutta and his MA from Calcutta University and his D.Phil from Oxford. Apart from the University of Hawaii, Manoa, he has held academic positions at the University of Delhi, University College London and Stonybrook University.

Tridip Suhrud

Tridip Suhrud is a scholar, writer and translator who works on the intellectual and cultural history of modern Gujarat and the Gandhian intellectual tradition. As the director and chief editor of the Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust (2012-2017), he was responsible for creating the world’s largest digital archive on Gandhi- the Gandhi Heritage Portal. His books include the critical edition of Hind Swaraj, Narayan Desai’s four-volume biography of Gandhi, My Life is My Message, and the four-volume epic Gujarati novel, Sarasvatichandra. His recent works include a critical edition of Gandhi’s autobiography My Experiments with Truth in two languages; Gujarati and English and The Diary of Manu Gandhi (1943-44) and a compilation The Power of Non-Violent Resistance.
He is working on an eight-volume compendium of testimonies of indigo cultivators of Champaran and the second part of The Diary of Manu Gandhi (1946-1948). He is professor and Provost of CEPT University, and Director of Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Institute of Indology, Ahmedabad and serves as Chairman of the Governing Council of MICA.

Dr. Shagata Mukherjee
Lead, NITI Aayog Behavioural Insights Unit
PhD, Georgia State University

Dr. Shagata Mukherjee is the Lead – NITI Aayog Behavioural Insights Unit (BIU) and a Deputy Director at the Centre for Social and Behavioural Change at Ashoka University. Prior to this position, Shagata was an Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Meghnad Desai Academy of Economics. He was also a Visiting Fellow at the Mumbai School of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Mumbai and an Affiliated Faculty at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) Nuffield -FLAME. He is the recipient of the Vernon L. Smith Young Talent Award in Experimental Finance for his research on gender and microfinance and is a co-founder of the Mumbai Behavioural Network. Shagata holds a PhD in Behavioural and Experimental Economics from the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, a Master’s degree in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University and a B.Sc. in Economics from Presidency College.