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Tarun Khanna

Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School; Director, The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University

Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School and Director of the Lakshmi Mittal & Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University. He studies entrepreneurship as a means to social and economic development across the emerging markets, is a co-founder and board member of several technology companies and non-profits across the developing world, and an occasional member of commissions of the Government of India related to education, scientific advance and entrepreneurship.

Vikram Patel

Pershing Square Professor of Global Health, Harvard Medical School; Professor, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health; Co-founder, Sangath

Vikram Patel is the Pershing Square Professor of Global Health and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow at the Harvard Medical School. He co-leads the GlobalMentalHealth@Harvard initiative. His work has focused on the burden of mental health problems, their association with social disadvantage, and the use of community resources for their prevention and treatment. He is a co-founder of Sangath, an Indian NGO which won the WHO Public Health Champion of India prize. He is a Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences and has served on the Committee which drafted India’s first National Mental Health Policy and the WHO High Level Independent Commission for NCDs. He has been awarded the Chalmers Medal, the Sarnat Prize, the Pardes Humanitarian Prize, an Honorary OBE and the John Dirk Canada Gairdner Award in Global Health. He was listed in TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential persons of the year in 2015.

Nachiket Mor

Visiting Scientist, The Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health

Nachiket Mor has a PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. His work is focused on the design of national and regional health systems. He is a Visiting Scientist at The Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy at IIIT Bangalore.

Poonam Muttreja

Executive Director, Population Foundation of India

Poonam Muttreja is the Executive Director of the Population Foundation of India and for the last 40 years has been a strong advocate of women’s health, reproductive & sexual rights and rural livelihoods. She has co-conceived the popular transmedia initiative, Main Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon – I, A Woman, Can Achieve Anything. Before joining PFI, she served as the India Country Director of the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation for 15 years and has also co-founded and led the Ashoka Foundation, Dastkar, and the Society for Rural, Urban and Tribal Initiative (SRUTI). An alumna of Delhi University and Harvard University’s John F Kennedy School of Government, Poonam serves on the governing council of several non-governmental organisations, and is a regular commentator in India and globally for television and the print media.

Vijay Chandru

Professor, Interdisciplinary Research, Indian Institute of Science

Professor Vijay Chandru (PhD MIT) has served on the faculty of engineering at Purdue University and now with interdisciplinary research in digital health at the Indian Institute of Science. An elected fellow of both the Indian academy of sciences and engineering, he is a distinguished alumnus of BITS Pilani and the MIT India program. An inventor of the Simputer, he is a founder of Strand Life Sciences, India’s leading precision medicine solutions company which he led as Executive Chairman from inception in 2000 till retirement in 2018. A technology pioneer of the World Economic Forum since 2006, he served with the IAC of WEF on the future of healthcare from 2014-16. In his work at the Centre for Health Equity and Transparency and OPFORD Foundation, Professor Chandru has been committed to orphan diseases outreach with scalable platforms towards the vision of “no disease orphan by 2030.

Indu Bhushan

Chairperson, Partnership for Impact (P4i) and former CEO of National Health Authority

Indu Bhushan is an alumnus of Bloomberg School of Public Health (PhD 1995, MHS 1993). He was the founding Chief Executive Office of Ayushman Bharat—Pradhan Mantri Jan Ayogya Yojana—India’s flagship health assurance scheme covering more than 500 million people from 2018 to 2021. He also led the implementation the National Digital Health Mission (later renamed Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission), an initiative to develop the backbone and eco-system for digital health in the India.
Before his appointment as CEO, AB-PMJAY, he served as Director General, East Asia Department of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). He has held multiple positions within ADB including Director General, Strategy and Policy Department. He was also the Chair of ADB’s Health Sector Community of Practice for a decade.
He is currently Chairperson of an NGO—Partnership for Impact (P4i) and serves on the board of several corporate and not-for-profit organisations.

Mirai Chatterjee

Director, Social Security Team, Self-Employed Women’s Association [SEWA]

Mirai Chatterjee is the Director of the Social Security Team at Self-Employed Women’s Association, (SEWA). She is also Chairperson of the SEWA Cooperative Federation of 106 women’s primary cooperatives. In addition, she is responsible for SEWA’s health care, child care and insurance programmes. She was Chairperson of the National Insurance VimoSEWA Cooperative Ltd and the Lok Swasthya Health Cooperative, and is actively involved in both as a board member and founder. She joined SEWA in 1984 and was its General Secretary after its Founder, Ela Bhatt.
Ms Chatterjee serves as Chairperson of the global informal workers and policy-makers network, WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment Globalising and Organising), and on the Boards of several organizations, including the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), Save the Children, PRADAN and now the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. She was advisor to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector and is in the Advisory Group on Community Action of the National Rural Health Mission. She was also a Commissioner in the World Health Organization’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. In addition, she was a member of the High Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage set up by the Planning Commission of India in 2010. Further, she was a member of the National Advisory Council (NAC), appointed by the Prime Minister of India in 2010, she was conferred the Global Achievement award by the School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University.
Ms. Chatterjee has a B.A. from Harvard University in History and Science and a Masters from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Public Health, USA.

Anuska Kalita

Visiting Scientist and India Health System Specialist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Anuska Kalita is a Visiting Scientist and India Health System Specialist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She has worked in the health sector for more than 16 years, in India and other countries in South Asia, in a variety of roles ranging from research and implementation to grant-making and policy. Before joining Harvard, she worked with the Gates Foundation and The World Bank and has been closely involved in designing some landmark health policies, most notably India’s nationwide ASHA Program and the primary care program under the National Health Policy (2017). At Harvard, Anuska has been at the forefront of a first-of-its-kind comprehensive health system assessment in India. Her research focuses on quality of care, citizens’ perceptions and satisfaction, and political economy in mixed health systems with public and private sector interactions. Anuska has trained at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and Harvard University, where she is pursuing her doctoral degree.

Kheya Melo Furtado

Associate Professor, Goa Institute of Management

Kheya is the Bajaj Visiting Research Fellow at the Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard University, Spring ‘23. She is Associate Professor of Healthcare Management at the Goa Institute of Management, India, and works in the areas of Health Systems Financing and Public Health. Her recent research focuses on policy and implementation around India’s publicly financed insurance programmes in collaboration with the World Health Organization. Prior to her academic position at GIM, she worked at the NITI Aayog, the policy think-tank of the Government of India, where she implemented key projects including the NITI Health Index for ranking States on their performance and drafting the Health Chapter of the Three- Year Action Agenda for Government of India 2017-18 to 2019-20, among several others. Her doctoral research on engaging private providers in disease surveillance was carried out under the INSPIRE Fellowship Award of the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India.

Siddhesh Zadey BSMS MSc-GH

Co-founder, Association for Socially Applicable Research (ASAR – असर), Pune, Maharashtra, India
Senior Research Aide, Department of Surgery, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham North Carolina, United States of America

Siddhesh Zadey is a co-founding director of nonprofit nongovernmental research and advocacy group based in India – Association for Socially Applicable Research (ASAR – असर). He is also a Research Aide in the Department of Surgery at Duke university School of Medicine (DU-SOM).He completed the Bachelor of Science Master of Science (BSMS) dual degree program at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune in 2018. For hisMaster’s thesis, he worked at Harvard Medical School with Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone on non-invasive brain stimulation markers for cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease. He completed his second Master’s from the Duke Global Health Institute in 2021, working with Dr. Joao Vissoci on surgical care access in rural India. At ASAR, he focusses on health systems modeling to investigate human resources for health, health expenditures, access to healthcare and impact evaluation of healthcare interventions. At Duke, he works in the Global Emergency Medicine Innovation and Implementation (GEMINI) Research Lab co-led by Drs. Catherine Staton and Joao Vissoci at Division of Emergency Medicine, DU-SOM focusing on behavioral phenotyping for substance use underlying injuries. He co-leads the Duke Bass Connections Team investigating cultural variations in alcohol use behaviors. He also works with Dr. Tamara Fitzgerald, Division of Pediatric Surgery, DU-SOM on designing and testing laparoscopes for improving access to gasless laparoscopy in low-income countries. He recently served as a member of the ‘Indian Academy of Pediatrics COVID-19 Task Force for School Reopening’ in 2021. He is a part of the Global Burden of Disease Collaborators Network, Mental Health Innovation Network, and Global Mental Health Action Network. His research and advocacy works have been published in the Lancet, British Medical Journal, BMJ Global Health, Global Health Now, Think Global Health, Wire Science, Neurobiology of Aging, and Brain Stimulation among other outlets.

Pamela Das

Senior Executive Editor, The Lancet

Pamela Das joined The Lancet family of journals in 2001. She is currently a Senior Executive Editor at The Lancet, where she co-lead’s the journal’s global health work with the Editor-in-Chief, Richard Horton. This work has led to a new role for the journal—to use organised science as a strong platform for social and political action. Her areas of interest are infectious diseases and tropical medicine, global health, public health, and international health policy. Her roles include peer review, and regularly writing editorials and for other sections of the journal, as well as overseeing The Lancet’s Comment and News sections. Pam is co-Chair of The Lancet’s racial equality group, GRacE and an advisory board member of the Global Health Film Festival. She is a PhD Science graduate in Biochemistry, and prior to working at The Lancet spent a few years as a medical writer and a journalist.

Shubhangi Bhadada

Mittal Institute Fellow, Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University

Shubhangi Bhadada is the Mittal Institute Fellow at the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute. She has previously worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia and at a governance think-tank in New Delhi. She was also a Fellow at the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and has consulted with Human Rights Watch and International Corporate Accountability Roundtable. She has a B.A. LLB (Hons.) degree from National Law School of India University, Bangalore, India and LLMs from University of Oxford and Harvard Law School.

Angarika Datta

Communications and Outreach Manager,
Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University

Angarika Datta is the Communications and Outreach Manager at the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University, where she oversees communications strategy development, social media management, content coordination, and engagement and collaboration. She has previously worked in communications with the United Nations Development Programme, and has written on topics such as sustainable lifestyles, women empowerment, and biodiversity conservation. She also holds a Master’s degree in Public Administration.

Yuvika Pharaswal

Program Coordinator
Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University

Yuvika Pharaswal is a Climate Coordinator at the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University. Yuvika holds a master’s degree in Sustainable Development Practice from the TERI School of Advanced Studies and a bachelor’s in commerce from Delhi University. She has worked across corporate and development sectors, with roles at organizations such as Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), Ernst & Young, and Accenture. She has experience in project management, stakeholder management, financial systems, and sustainable practices, focusing on addressing climate change challenges through value chain development, livelihood management and agroecological transformations. Her research includes work on sustainable farming in Karnataka and climate-sensitive resource management in Uttarakhand.