Pavan Mamidi is the Director of the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change (CSBC), he seeks to investigate social norms, trust, pro-social behaviour, and behavioural ethics using lab and lab-in-the-field experiments. Owing to significant experience in the research space, Pavan has previously held the coveted portfolio of Director (founding) for Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) Nuffield – FLAME University.

Having demonstrated extensive experience in the education sector, Pavan has served as a faculty member at IIM Ahmedabad teaching legal aspects of policies and business, contracts, negotiations and conflict resolution. He also taught research methodologies for various doctoral programs.

Pavan has also mentored senior government officers, including IPS on the policy programs at the National Police Academy and IAS at LBSNAA in Mussoorie. Apart from these, he has held positions at educational organisations of repute worldwide such as IIM Bangalore, MIT (Solan), the University of Michigan Law School and Harvard Law School.

Magsaysay Prize -winner P. Sainath is a journalist who focuses on social and economic inequality, deprivation and poverty, particularly in rural India. Sainath was McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University in Fall 2012 and has been conferred doctorates by two other Universities. In India, he has taught journalism for 30 years. His book, ‘Everybody Loves A Good Drought’, was declared a Penguin Classic in 2013 and is in its 50th print run. In 2014, Sainath launched the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), a unique online project on rural India, with its 833 million people, speaking 780 living languages and a bewildering array of stories, occupations, arts, music, culture, and a lot more. PARI, which publishes in 12 Indian languages, is a totally independent multimedia digital platform creating a unique database, the only one of its kind that can lay claim to journalism representative of every region and section of rural people in this incredibly diverse nation.

Dr Ramanan Laxminarayan is founder and director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP) in Washington, D.C., and a senior research scholar at Princeton University. He is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington and a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland and at the University of Kwazulu Natal in South Africa. He chairs the board of GARDP, a global product development partnership created by the World Health Organization, that aims to develop and deliver new treatments for bacterial infections. He is also founder and board chair at HealthCubed, which works to improve access to healthcare and diagnostics worldwide.

Dr Laxminarayan has worked to improve the understanding of antibiotic resistance as a problem of managing a shared global resource. He has served on the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology’s antimicrobial resistance working group and is currently a voting member of the US Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antimicrobial Resistance.

He is a winner of the Ella Pringle medal by the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh and the BP Koirala medal in honour of Nepal’s first democratically elected Prime Minister.

Nikhil Dey is a social activist and co-founder of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) and the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI). Since 1990, he has been actively involved in the struggles of the poor for justice and human rights, including grass-root struggles for land, right to food, payment of minimum wages, the RTI Movement and NREGA. Nikhil has also played a prominent part in the ongoing effort by people’s movements to build institutions of participatory democracy.

Dr Balasubramaniam is the Founder of the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement and Grassroots Research And Advocacy Movement. Having lived and worked for several years among remote forest-based tribal communities in the southern Indian district of Mysuru, he has uniquely been able to combine a vast development sector experience with studying and teaching at the world’s leading schools of policy and development including Harvard and Cornell Universities. He was a special investigator for Lokayukta Karnataka (Anti-Corruption Commission) and held membership and consulting positions in government bodies and commissions, academic boards and development agencies including the World Bank.

Ashok Alexander in 2003 started his work to establish an HIV prevention program – Avahan, for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that aimed to help stop the growth of HIV in India. In less than three years, Avahan became the world’s largest-ever HIV prevention program, working in six states and over 600 towns. In 2014, Ashok set up the Antara Foundation to see if the methods of scaling from business used there could be applied to maternal and child health.

Ashok’s career has spanned the worlds of business and public health delivery. He has demonstrated how business principles can be applied to scale up the delivery of complex public health solutions in HIV prevention and maternal and child health, across India.

Urvashi Butalia is an independent publisher and writer. Co-founder of India’s first feminist publishing house, Kali for Women, she now heads Zubaan, an imprint of Kali. She has had a long involvement in the women’s movement in India, and writes for newspapers, journals and books at home and abroad on a range of issues to do with women and gender. Among her best-known publications is the award-winning oral history of Partition: The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (winner of the Oral History Book Association award 2001 and the Nikkei Asia Award for Culture 2003). She is also visiting faculty at Ashoka University Sonepat. Butalia has received many awards for her work, among them the Padma Shri, which she was awarded in 2011.

Adrian Sargeant is Co-Director of the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy, visiting Professor of Fundraising at Avila University and the Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He was formerly the first Hartsook Chair in Fundraising at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University. He designed the UK’s system of professional education for fundraisers and is currently working on the European qualification framework for the European Fundraising Association.

Saikat Datta is an award-winning investigative reporter, author, de-risking specialist and public policy professional. He has covered the insurgency in Kashmir, Chhattisgarh and various other disasters. Today he is applying that experience to the task of building the Gurugram COVID19 Integrated Command Centre.

Nachiket Mor’s current work focuses on designing national and regional health systems. He was a member of the Planning Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Universal Health Care, the Primary Care Task Force of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the Health Commission for the State of Himachal Pradesh, and the Task Force on Global Health at the Academy of Medicine in Washington DC. He helped create a new model for comprehensive primary care, pioneered by SughaVazhvu Healthcare in remote rural parts of Tamil Nadu, and offers a seminar on Health Systems Design at the Chennai based Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Anshu Gupta is the Founder of Goonj, an Indian non-profit that aims to bring an equitable relationship of strength, sustenance and dignity between the cities and villages of India. He was recognised with the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2015 for ‘his creative vision in transforming the culture of giving in India, his enterprising leadership in treating cloth as a sustainable development resource for the poor, and in reminding theworld that true giving always respects and preserves human dignity’. An Ashoka and Schwab fellow, Anshu is a member of the Humanitarian Crisis Council of the World Economic Forum.

Dr Vikram Patel is the Pershing Square Professor of Global Health in the Blavatnik Institute’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He also co-founded Sangath, an Indian NGO which won the MacArthur Foundation’s International Prize for Creative and Effective Institutions in 2008 and the WHO Public Health Champion of India award in 2016.