Dr. Niranjan Saggurti, PhD, a demographer, statistician and public health researcher with more than 20 years of experience in program and policy oriented research and evaluations with a special focus on sexual and reproductive health in India. Dr. Saggurti currently provides technical and strategic oversight to Council’s research, evaluation and implementation science work. Prior to this, Dr. Saggurti worked as Senior Program Officer with the Measurement, Learning and Evaluation team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Currently, he is on several core committees of the Indian government, including India FP2020, Ending PMTCT, RMNCAH Coalition and provides technical advisory to a number of research-based NGOs in New Delhi. Dr. Saggurti has published more than 150 papers in peer-reviewed journals and has implemented numerous interventions testing their efficacy and sustainability.

Anil Paul, a management graduate, is a result-oriented, seasoned corporate strategist and a management professional. Paul has held senior management positions for over 30 years in the public and non-profit sectors. In addition to his board responsibilities, he serves as Director of Administration, Finance & Human Resources with Population Council, India. He has led the operations of Population Council for over two decades and has provided leadership during major organizational changes and restructuring at the local level.

Dr Rajib Acharya is a statistician, demographer, public health specialist, and policy advisor with more than two decades of experience in public health research, and planning, designing, managing, and monitoring large-scale studies. Dr. Acharya is an expert in designing and implementing large-scale sample surveys, longitudinal studies on population, health, and nutrition. He has been instrumental in designing, managing, and conducting several unique, first-ever national and sub-national studies in India. He also designed evaluation studies using various experimental and non-experimental designs and applied advanced statistical techniques to measure impact. Dr. Acharya has authored over 75 peer-reviewed journal articles, books and chapters, and scientific reports; and serves as reviewer of several international journals, including The Lancet, the Lancet Global Health, BMJ, Plos One, and BMC Women’s Health.

Dr Santhya is an economist and population scientist with almost three decades of experience in conducting research that builds strategies to improve adolescent girls’ reproductive and sexual health, gender-based violence, and maternal health. She also builds capacity of researchers and program implementers. Dr. Santhya has extensive experience designing and conducting qualitative and quantitative studies on the rights of youth, gender equity, reproductive health, and gender-based violence. She has published several book chapters, international peer-reviewed journal articles, and study reports.

Dr. Sapna Desai is an epidemiologist and public health practitioner whose areas of interest are women’s health, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and implementation and evaluation of community-based programs and health systems. Her current work focuses on examining the effect of women’s group interventions on health outcomes; epidemiology and treatment-seeking for gynecological morbidity; and women’s engagement with health systems through the life cycle. Dr. Desai previously spent several years working with the Self-Employed Women’s Association, an organization of women workers in the informal economy, where she led the national community health worker team that implemented primary health and health insurance programs in several states. She holds a Ph.D. in Epidemiology and Population Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and an MS in International Health from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Dr. Bidhubhusan Mahapatra is a monitoring, research, and evaluation professional with over 12 years of experience in public and nonprofit sectors. Trained in statistics and demography, Dr. Mahapatra is an expert in evaluation methods, real time program monitoring, machine learning methods, and mixed-method research approaches. Dr. Mahapatra has worked across various South Asian countries on cross-cutting health and development issues including agriculture, nutrition, climate change, RMNCAH, HIV and family planning. Dr. Mahapatra has published more than 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals, working papers, technical briefs, and reports.

Avishek Hazra is a demographer and statistician with over 15 years of experience in public health research and program evaluations. . He completed his Master’s in statistics and received a fellowship award from the Government of India that helped him earn an MPhil and PhD in Population Studies from the International Institute for Population Sciences,  Mumbai, a Deemed University under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. He was given the prestigious Dr. C. Chandrasekaran Award as an honor of ‘Young Demographer of the Year 2008’. He is currently leading several behavioral studies focusing on issues around reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health, nutrition, sanitation, women empowerment and m-health studies. He has valuable experience in leading many complex health interventions evaluations, an important one being the evaluation of interventions with women’s self-help groups. He has also worked in an Indo-US collaborative contraceptive Phase 3 clinical trial in India. Hazra has published more than 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited several books. He is member of various professional academic forums and has served as a technical advisor to the World Health Organization.

Avina Sarna, MD MPH Ph.D., is a public health physician with expertise in sexual and reproductive health, HIV, nutrition, and migrant populations. For almost three decades, Dr. Sarna has conducted numerous research and operations research studies in India, Thailand, Kenya, Zambia, ‘Iran,’ and the USA. During 2002-2009, Dr. Sarna coordinated the Council’s global research agenda on access to treatment implemented under the USAID-funded Global Operations Research Program, Horizons. As Principal Investigator, she has led several studies funded by USAID, CIDA, NACO, Government of India, and PEPFAR. As well, Dr. Sarina had led two NIH funded randomized controlled studies in India. Most recently, Dr. Sarna co-led the Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey that provided the first-ever national and state-level estimates for malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies among children and adolescents in India. Previously, Dr. Sarna coordinated a double-blind randomized controlled study funded by the FDA, USA, and consulted with UNICEF in Iran. Dr. Sarna is widely published.

Dr. Sowmya Ramesh is an epidemiologist and public health researcher with more than 18 years of experience in maternal and neonatal health, nutrition, sanitation, environmental & occupational health, HIV, financial inclusion, and skill development. She has experience in conducting national and international quantitative and qualitative research studies and impact evaluations and implementing projects of national importance. Previously, Dr. Ramesh worked as Monitoring & Research Officer at United Nations Development Program (UNDP), India and served as a Moderator & Resource Person for UN Solution Exchange. Dr. Ramesh has authored and co-authored over 25 publications. Dr. Ramesh has a MPH degree in Epidemiology from Harvard School of Public Health and an MPH from Texas A & M University Health Science Center.

Radhika Dayal is a public health practitioner and qualitative researcher with a decade of research and management experience. She conducts multi-component mixed method evaluations that focus on issues like reducing child marriage and teenage pregnancy; increasing comprehensive sexuality education and increasing female employment in India. She has extensive experience in project management and is proficient in conducting qualitative studies, systematic reviews, and evidence synthesis on girls’ empowerment, gender-based violence, and adolescent sexual and reproductive health. She has experience in using different monitoring and evaluation approaches like conducting impact and process evaluation, and using participatory research methods like mystery clients and youth engagement.

Prior to joining the Population Council as Technical Specialist, Radhika worked with John Snow Inc. (JSI), India office and the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI). Radhika holds a Masters in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics, and a Post Graduate Diploma in Epidemiology, Indian Institute of Public Health, Delhi, PHFI.

Raman Mishra is a data scientist trained in Biostatistics and Demography. Raman has extensive experience of data management, analysis and predictive modelling. He is well versed in the use of statistical softwares like Python, R, STATA, and SPSS. He has worked on data from multiple countries and has expertise in the application of advanced statistical analysis such as latent class/profile analysis, multilevel modelling, and geo-spatial analysis. Besides being a number cruncher, Raman is adept in scientific writing. He has authored peer-reviewed journal articles on non-communicable diseases, social capital and disability. His areas of interest are ageing, family planning, poverty, and climate change.

Nizamuddin Khan has a PhD in population studies from International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai and two Master’s degrees in Statistics with Computer Programming, and Population Studies (MPS). His 20+ years of experience includes health program evaluations, operations research design, development of M&E systems for health interventions, and quantitative data analysis using SPSS and STATA. He has several years of experience coordinating the large-scale surveys, initially with the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) and District Level Household Surveys (DLHS), and recently leading the field implementation of Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey (CNNS) in India. He has several publications to his credit. He also worked with the World Bank, IIPS, Futures Group International in the past leading the implementation of research studies in the field.

Madhusudana Battala, PhD., a geographer by education and demographer by profession.

He has close to two decades of research experience in the fields of family planning, gender based violence, community mobilization interventions planning and programs evaluations. He was a National Working Group member for Integrated Biological and Behavioral Survey, under the direction of National AIDS Control Organization. Prior to joining the Council, he worked with WHO-SEARO and International Institute for Population Sciences. He has hands-on experience in training and building capacity in qualitative techniques, participatory research methods, analysis and data management.

Nayan is an Economist by training and has over six years of research experience in public health and education and well versed with quantitative research skills. She holds a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) degree in Planning and Development with a specialization in health economics from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. She completed MSc. in Economics in Environment and Natural Resources Economics from TERI University, Delhi. Prior to joining PC Consulting, she worked as a health economist at Oxford Policy Management Pvt. Ltd., where she trained herself in health systems research and evaluation methods. She has worked as Senior Research Associate at ASER Centre, the research and evaluation unit of the Pratham Education Foundation. She started her career as an assistant professor of Economics at Glocal University and then joined as a consultant at Global Health Strategies (GHS).

Bishwajit is a qualified professional with demonstrated leadership in the development sector for 12 years. He is a management and analytics professional working in the domain of Public Health. He has diverse  experience in the field of  planning, designing, leading, coordinating, liasoning and implementation for maternal and child health programs across the states of Jharkhand and Bihar.

Dr. Sudeshna Maitra is an evaluation specialist. Prior to this, Dr. Maitra was a research associate at the National Institute of Rural Development & Panchayati Raj, Ministry of Rural Development, Hyderabad.

She is well versed with econometrics and other evaluation tools and is trained in handling large datasets. She completed her PhD in Economics from the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2020. She also holds an M.Phil in economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research domain includes gender economics, household behaviour and family economics, education, gender and nutrition, agriculture and rural development.