Vaiju Naravane is Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Media Studies at Ashoka University. For the past three decades she has held senior positions covering Europe, notably for The Times of India, Radio France Internationale, AITV and The Hindu. Prof. Naravane has taught Journalism and Contemporary Indian Literature at Sciences-Po, both in Paris and Le Havre and was the Director of Information of the Geneva-based World Health Organization. She is Foreign Fiction Editor at Albin Michel in Paris and is currently working on her second novel.

Prof. Naravane obtained degrees in the Humanities and Journalism from Pune University and spent a year travelling and writing in the USA as a Fellow of the World Press Institute, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Dr. K. “Vish” Viswanath is the Centre’s academic partner, focusing specifically on public health communications. He is advising the Centre on several projects related to designing health information trends survey to track changing patterns’ in people’s use and access to health seeking information, undertaking literature review on effective communication to reduce anemia among pregnant and lactating women and adolescent girls, amongst others.

He is Lee Kum Kee Professor of Health Communication in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) and in the McGraw-Patterson Center for Population Sciences at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI). He is also the Faculty Director of the Health Communication Core of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC). Dr. Viswanath’s work, drawing from literatures in communication science, social epidemiology, and social and health behavior sciences, focuses on translational communication science to influence public health policy and practice. His primary research is in documenting the relationship between communication inequalities, poverty and health disparities, and knowledge translation to address health disparities.

He has written more than 200 journal articles and book chapters concerning communication inequalities and health disparities, knowledge translation, public health communication campaigns, e-health and digital divide, public health preparedness and the delivery of health communication interventions to underserved populations.

Pramath Raj Sinha is a Senior Advisor of the Albright Stonebridge Group, India and the Founder and Managing Director of 9.9 Mediaworx Private Limited. Prior to founding 9.9 Media, he was a Partner at Mckinsey and led the ABP Group, one of India’s leading and most diversified media conglomerates. Pramath helped set up and served as the Founding Dean of the Indian School of Business (ISB). He continues to be a member of its Board of Governors.

Pramath is a Director on the Boards of PRADAN, India’s leading development institution focused on improving livelihoods in the country’s poorest district and of the Central Square Foundation, a philanthropic fund focused on improving the educational outcomes for low-income children in India. He holds a Bachelors degree from IIT Kanpur and an MSE and PhD from University of Pennsylvania.

Pavan Mamidi is the Director of the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change (CSBC), Ashoka University. Previously, he was the director (founding) of the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) Nuffield – FLAME University. Pavan is interested in investigating social norms, trust, prosocial behaviour and behavioural ethics using lab and lab-in-the-field experiments.

Pavan has also been a faculty member at IIM-Ahmedabad in the Business Policy area. He has taught courses on empirical research methods in the doctoral program along with law and negotiations, and dispute resolution in several public policy programs for the Government. He has also taught in policy programs for senior government officers, including the IPS at the National Police Academy and IAS at LBSNAA in Mussoorie. He has held positions at IIM Bangalore, MIT (Sloan), the University of Michigan Law School, and Harvard Law School where he is an affiliated faculty at the Center on the Legal Profession.

Pavan has an LL.M. from Harvard Law School and a Doctorate (D.Phil) in Sociology from the University of Oxford.

Sharon Barnhardt is the Director – Research at the Centre for Social and Behaviour 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.

Diksha Radhakrishnan is the Deputy Director at the Centre for Social & Behaviour 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.

Shagata Mukherjee is the Lead - Behavioural Insights Unit of India, NITI Aayog 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.

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.

Dr. Sanna Balsari-Palsule is a Senior Research Specialist at the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change at Ashoka University. She is a behavioural scientist interested in the dynamics of behaviour change and the mechanisms that link intrinsic, psychological traits (e.g. personality, motivation) to a variety of important life outcomes.

Dr. Sanna holds teaching positions at the Department of Psychology, Ashoka University and previously at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Prior to joining CSBC, she was a Senior Behavioural Scientist at Dalberg, where she led the set up of a behavioural sciences team and advised projects from data privacy, nutrition and financial inclusion. Dr. Sanna is a passionate personality scientist, she is a columnist for Psychology Today, Fast Company and Inc. and founder of Tango Metrics - a personality-based startup.

Dr. Sanna received her PhD from the University of Cambridge.

Dr. Sneha Shashidhara is a senior research consultant at the Centre for Social and Behaviour 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.

Pooja Haldea is a Senior Advisor at the Centre for Social and Behaviour 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 Behaviour 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.

Dr. Narges Hajimoladarvish is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change. Dr. Narges is a trained economist with an interest in Behavioural and Experimental Economics. She runs experiments to investigate decision-making under risk and uncertainty and has expertise in eliciting risk and time preferences.

Dr. Narges has a PhD in Economics from the University of Leicester. She has 11 years of experience in teaching a variety of courses at the University of Leicester and Alzahra University. Prior to Joining CSBC, Dr. Narges was an Assistant Professor at Alzahra University where she wrote an introductory book about Behavioural Economics in Farsi and established a laboratory for Experimental Economics. She has also contributed to Financial Tribune, an Iranian English Economic Daily.