Anitha Kurup is a Professor in the School of Social Sciences and Head of the Education Programme. She leads the National Gifted and Talented Education Program in India anchored at NIAS. Her research interests span the broad disciplines of education and gender studies. Her recent publications “Trained Scientific Women Power: How much are we Losing and Why?” and “Trends Report: Creation and Analysis of Database of PhDs in India (1998-2007)” have been widely appreciated. As part of the Gifted Education research, she and her team have developed Indian based protocols to identify the gifted children in the age group 3-18 years for different populations- urban and rural. They have been working on the standardisation of the identification protocols. Along the same lines she is developing a multi-level multi-stage model for mentoring gifted children in rural and urban India. She was part of the National core team that developed a 4-year integrated curriculum for pre-service teachers training for India. As part of the sub-committee, she contributed to the development of disability and special education as one of the streams of the four year integrated pre-service teacher education curriculum. She and her team on Vocational education have initiated an exploratory study on understanding the skill gaps and aspirations of the diploma/ITI holders in the manufacturing sector in Bangalore. The study will be used to develop a research agenda in vocational and higher education in India. Her doctoral work on the quality of primary education in rural India is one of the earliest often cited work on grounded research in classroom processes and school –community relationship in rural India. Prof Anitha Kurup's expertise in gender covers a wide spectrum, from examining conceptual and methodological strands of gender relations to political participation and decentralised governance. Prof. Anitha Kurup was a Member, Governing Board of ISEC, Bangalore, and Member, Academic Council, Christ University. She has several publications to her credit. Prof Anitha Kurup was awarded the Fulbright Nehru Senior Research Fellowship for 2011-2012 and was hosted at the University of California, Davis. Prof Anitha Kurup is also the Chair and Academic Head of Ph.D. Programme.
