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Prakash Panneerselvam is an assistant professor in the International Strategic & Security Studies Programme at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bengaluru, India. He was the first visiting fellow at the Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force (JMSDF) Staff College in Tokyo. He has also been a visiting researcher at the Graduate School of Law, Kobe University, Japan. Furthermore, he holds the position of Non-Resident Scholar at the Research Institute for Indo-Pacific Affairs (RIIPA). He has received the Japan Foundation Indo-Pacific Partnership (JFIPP) Research Fellowship for 2023-2024, the Japan Foundation Fellowship in 2011, and the Okita Memorial Fellowship in 2008. Before joining NIAS, he worked with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in the Defence & Aerospace Sector. He assisted a committee of experts with amendments to the Defence Procurement Procedure 2013 and formulation of the policy framework for the Defence Procurement Procedure. Prakash was also a trained merchant mariner. He holds an M.Phil. and PhD in International Politics from the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India.

Carol Upadhya, a social anthropologist, has researched and published widely on a range of social transformations related to development, economic change, urbanization, provincial capital, labour and migration in contemporary India. 

Prof. Upadhya was Co-director of the Provincial Globalisation and Speculative Urbanism projects at NIAS. She has received research grants from the National Science Foundation (USA), Azim Premji Foundation, Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR), WOTRO Science for Global Development of the NWO (Netherlands), and the Indo-Dutch Programme on Alternatives in Development (Netherlands).

She has been a visiting scholar at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS), Uppsala, Sweden; Central European University, Budapest; Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Goettingen, Germany; and the International Institute of Asian Studies, Amsterdam. 

Professor Upadhya’s latest publication is a co-edited volume (with Vinay Gidwani and Michael Goldman), Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). She is the author of Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Provincial Globalization in India: Transregional Mobilities and Development Politics (Routledge, 2018). 

Upadhya is Co-editor of the Journal of South Asian Development and serves on the Editorial Board for Contributions to Indian Sociology.