Alumni

Ishita holds a Master’s in Public Policy from St Xavier’s College and BSc Economics (Hons) from Symbiosis School of Economics. Previously, she was associated with the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay where she worked on a project studying the effects of climate change on the fishing community in Maharashtra. Her research interests include labour, migration and livelihood studies.

Paul Thomas has completed his Integrated Master's in Economics from the University of Hyderabad. He is interested in using interdisciplinary approaches to study societies, specifically the holistic wellbeing of individuals. He likes to play badminton in the evenings.

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.

Prof. Janaki Balakrishnan heads the Complex Systems Programme in the School of Natural Sciences and 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.  

Research Interests:  

Dynamical systems theory and its applications to physical, biological & real world  problems, complex systems, bubble dynamics, acoustic cavitation, ecological modelling, physics of sensory systems, synchronization of neuronal activity, bursting behaviour in neurons, stochastic processes, quantum field theory in flat & curved spacetimes.  

Select Publications:

Click here for Dr Janaki Balakrishnan's Selected Publications.