People Page

Pallavi Krishnappa holds a Master’s degree in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Before this, she worked as a researcher looking at the role of fake news and misinformation in election campaigns. Her academic interests currently lie at the intersection of digital technology, gender and questions of access. She also likes to read fiction in her free time.

Kritika has completed her Master's in Social Work (Livelihoods and Social Entrepreneurship) from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and MPhil in Planning and Development from IIT Bombay. For her MPhil thesis, she worked on Urban Commons and Bourgeois Environmentalism. Her research interests include livelihoods, gender, environmentalism and climate change.

Nisar Kannangara is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Inequality and Human Development Programme, NIAS. His research areas include political anthropology, ethnography of housing, and the autonomous adaptation of climate change. He received his PhD in Anthropology from Pondicherry University in 2019. Before joining NIAS, he was a Project Associate with the Kerala Cultural Museum, Directorate of Culture, Trivandrum, Kerala.

Swati Narayan’s research focuses on the analysis of human development and social policies from an inter-disciplinary perspective, across South Asia and especially in India. Prior to NIAS, she was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Development. Previously, she has worked extensively as an independent researcher with a range of international and national non-government organisations and managed South Asian research at Oxfam GB.

She has completed her PhD at the Tata Institute of Social Science (TISS), Mumbai. Previously she has Masters' degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London and TISS. She is also an alumna of the Cambridge Advanced Programme in Rethinking Development Economics (CAPORDE) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

For more than a decade, she has also been an activist with a range of civil society organisations.

Chetan Choithani obtained his PhD in Development Geography from the University of Sydney, and prior to his present employment at NIAS he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Urban Studies Institute of Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University. His research and teaching interests include migration and urbanization, food and nutrition security, livelihoods, gender, and social policy, and how they relate to human development, particularly in the Indian context.

Mr. Eros Sunny, Project Associate, SERB, DST Project  (Power Grant Scheme).

Dr. Janaki Balakrishnan anchors the Complex Systems Programme in the School of Natural Sciences & Engineering at NIAS. She obtained her PhD in Theoretical High Energy Physics from the University of Delhi. She has subsequently worked and published in a wide range of areas covering many diverse areas of physics, ranging from quantum field theory in curved space and theoretical high energy physics to dynamical systems theory and biological physics. She was an Associate Professor of Physics at the Central University of Hyderabad for several years before moving to Bangalore. Earlier she has held Visiting and other positions at various places including the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, Centre for Artificial Intelligence & Robotics (CAIR), Bangalore, CMMACS, Bangalore, JNCASR, Indian Institute of Science, Raman Research Institute, The University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, U.K., Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, the Max-Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany, etc.

Dr Aleena Sebastian is an Assistant Professor at NIAS, Bangalore. Before joining NIAS, she was postdoctoral Fellow in a DBT Wellcome Trust/India Alliance Senior Research Fellowship research project with The Humsafar Trust, Mumbai. Dr. Sebastian secured her doctoral degree from the Department of Sociology, the University of Hyderabad in October 2019. 

Her research interests include the following: Social anthropology in South Asia, kinship and gender (with special reference to the matrilineal Muslim communities), health and Social Policy (with special reference to sexual gender minority communities)