The OICSD is comprised of top academics and researchers working on the most pressing questions of sustainable development facing the Global South.
They are supported in this work by an International Advisory Board enriched by its members’ broad interdisciplinary experience in the fields of law, governance, engineering, medicine, science and technology. The Board exists to offer strategic advice on the Centre’s work, and ensure it remains relevant to India. It comprises of a high level group of advisors with diverse expertise at the top of their fields.
OICSD Academics and Support Staff
Radhika Khosla
Research Director, Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development; Associate Professor, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment; Senior Research FellowDr Radhika Khosla is Associate Professor at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, School of Geography and the Environment, and Research Director of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, Somerville College, at the University of Oxford. She works on examining the productive tensions between urban transitions, energy services consumption and climate change with a focus on developing country cities.
Radhika is Principal Investigator of the Oxford Martin School’s interdisciplinary and multi-country programme on the Future of Cooling, which examines and helps shape the unprecedented increase in cooling energy demand growth. She is also Co-Investigator of Oxford Net Zero, an interdisciplinary research programme aimed at informing effective, equitable, and ambitious climate action; and Co-Investigator of the ZERO Institute, which brings together Oxford research on zero-carbon energy systems.
Alongside she leads complementary research projects on urban transitions and energy consumption (focussing on India). She is a contributing author to the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and lead author of the UNEP Emissions Gap Report (2020).
Radhika’s other current academic affiliations are at University of Pennsylvania (USA), and the Centre for Policy Research (India). She serves on the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office UK-India Advisory Board; on the Steering Committee of the Smart Surfaces Coalition; on boards of journals and book presses; and on a range of advisory roles within Oxford.
The two sets of interrelated questions underlie her research priorities. First, how does consumption of energy-related services change as cities urbanize? What are the socio-technical systems and institutional structures that shape (and can reconfigure) energy and carbon emission pathways? Second, what forms of governance and political rationalities characterize the varied urban responses to climate change in rapidly developing cities, given their (often competing) objectives to provide urban services? Her broader interdisciplinary research examines how cities in transition manage the tensions of meeting growing energy needs for development while protecting the local and global environment.
Previously, she has been a Research Affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (India), and Staff Scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (USA).
Radhika holds a PhD in the Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago and an undergraduate and master’s degrees in Physics from the University of Oxford.
Teaching
Spaces, Infrastructure and Technology for Net Zero, Sustainable Development, for the MSc in Enterprise and the Environment
Governance, Policy and Politics for the MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance, School of Geography and the Environment
Environmental Governance and Development for the MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance, School of Geography and the Environment
Climate Change Negotiations: Policy Challenge for the Master’s in Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government
Global Opportunities and Threats: Oxford Program for MBA students, Saïd Business School
Climate Change School, Oxford Climate Society, University of Oxford
Khosla, R. (2021) Electrifying the National Capital Region. In Colossus: The Anatomy of Delhi, eds. Chakravorty and Sircar, Cambridge University Press.
Khosla R, Jani A, Perera R. Health risks of extreme heat BMJ 2021; 375 :n2438
Khosla, R., Agarwal, A., Sircar, N. and Chatterjee, D. (2021) The what, why, and how of changing cooling energy consumption in India’s urban households. Environmental Research Letters, 16(4). 044035.
Khosla, R., et al. (2021) Climate Action Pathway: Net Zero cooling – Action table. The Carbon Trust
Mazzone, A. and Khosla, R. (2021) Socially constructed or physiologically informed? Placing humans at the core of understanding cooling needs. Energy Research and Social Science, 77. 102088.
Miranda, N.D., Renaldi, R., Khosla, R. and McCulloch, M.D. (2021) Bibliometric analysis and landscape of actors in passive cooling research. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 149. 111406.
Renaldi, R., Miranda, N.D., Khosla, R. and McCulloch, M.D. (2021) Patent landscape of not-in-kind active cooling technologies between 1998 and 2017. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2196. 126507.
Al Saud, N., Al Shalan, M., Al Shehri, T., Bari, M., Beaugrand, M., Howarth, N., Khosla, R., Krarti, M., Lanza, A., Lebot, B., Mangotra, K., Odnoletkova, N., Patzek, T. and Saheb, Y. (2020) Enhancing Voluntary Collaboration on Cooling Through the G20. T20 Saudi Arabia 2020 Think
Bhardwaj, A. and Khosla, R. (2020) Superimposition: How Indian city bureaucracies are responding to climate change. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space: 1-32.
Capstick, S., Khosla, R. and Wang, S. (2020) Bridging the gap – the role of equitable low-carbon lifestyles. UNEP Emissions Gap Report.
Creutzig, F., Bai, X., Khosla, R., Viguie, V. and Yamagata, Y. (2020) Systematizing and upscaling urban climate change mitigation. Environmental Research Letters, 15(10). 100202.
Kamat, A.S., Khosla, R. and Narayanamurti, V. (2020) Illuminating homes with LEDs in India: Rapid market creation towards low-carbon technology transition in a developing country. Energy Research and Social Science, 66. 101488.
Khosla, R. and Dubash, N. (2020) Rethinking India’s Energy Policy: Development Challenge around Multiple Objectives. Economic and Political Weekly, 55(32-33): 38-44.
Khosla, R., et al. (2020) Climate Action Pathway: Net-Zero Cooling – Executive Summary. Cool Coalition / UNEP
Khosla, R., Kamat, A.S. and Narayanamurti, V. (2020) Successful clean energy technology transitions in emerging economies: learning from India, China, and Brazil. Progress in Energy, 2(4). 043002.
Khosla, R., Miranda, N.D., Trotter, P.A., Mazzone, A., Renaldi, R., McElroy, C., Cohen, F., Jani, A., Perera-Salazar, R. and McCulloch, M. (2020) Cooling for sustainable development. Nature Sustainability.
Ürge-Vorsatz, D., Khosla, R., Bernhardt, R., Chan, Y.C., Vérez, D., Hu, S. and Cabeza, L.F. (2020) Advances Toward a Net-Zero Global Building Sector. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 45: 227-269.
Bhardwaj, A., Joshi, M., Khosla, R. and Dubash, N.K. (2019) More priorities, more problems? Decision-making with multiple energy, development and climate objectives. Energy Research and Social Science, 49: 143-157.
Khosla, R. (2019) India and Subnational Climate Change: An Emerging Discourse. Harvard Project on Climate Agreements
Khosla, R. and Bhardwaj, A. (2019) Urban India and Climate Change. Chapter 25 in, Dubash, N. (ed.) India in a Warming World: Integrating Climate Change and Development. Oxford University Press. 504 pp. ISBN: 9780199498734.
Khosla, R. and Janda, K.B. (2019) India’s building stock: towards energy and climate change solutions. Building Research and Information, 47(1): 1-7.
Khosla, R., Sircar, N. and Bhardwaj, A. (2019) Energy demand transitions and climate mitigation in low-income urban households in India. Environmental Research Letters, 14. 095008.
Sara Kalim
Fellow and Director of DevelopmentSara Kalim read Classics at Somerville from 1990-94. She then spent 14 years in the media, working as Head of Development for two major television production companies. Her work included developing access and ideas, and fundraising for documentaries and current affairs programming.
Sara has most recently worked for the University of Oxford for three years at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Department of Politics and International Relations, where she held responsibility for financial and strategic planning, and played an instrumental role in securing journalism scholarships from a variety of funding sources.
As Director of Development, Sara oversees Somerville’s fundraising strategy and development, is responsible for fundraising campaigns (including for the Margaret Thatcher Scholarship Trust and the Oxford India Centre), and heads up the Development Team. She is also a member of the College’s Management Team.
Sara has a long-standing family connection to India, with family coming from Patna, Bihar. She also studied at Somerville making her the perfect advocate to drive the further development of the Centre. Sara’s focus is on fundraising and profile-raising working with philanthropists and corporate partners.
If you are interested in making a gift, or are thinking about leaving a legacy, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
Siddharth Arora
Research Fellow; Associate, Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development; Parkinson's UK Early Career FellowSiddharth completed his DPhil, focused on developing statistical methods for time series forecasting, at Somerville College.
His research interests include Biomedical Signal & Image Processing, Statistical Modelling, Forecasting, and Chaos Synchronization. His work is primarily concerned with two application areas: Healthcare, and Energy.
Currently, Siddharth is investigating remote technologies for the diagnosis and monitoring of Parkinson’s disease. He develops statistical algorithms using data for voice, gait, posture, reaction times, dexterity, and tremor, collected using smartphones in a home and community setting. These algorithms are aimed at identifying patterns in the data, which can be used to discriminate people with Parkinson’s disease from healthy controls and accurately monitor the severity symptoms of the disease over time.
Siddharth is also working on a NHS funded project aimed at predicting the A&E arrivals, admissions and discharges across hospitals in the West Midlands. The algorithms developed as part of this project will be used operationally by the NHS to optimize staffing decisions, which would help reduce patient waiting times.
“Detecting and Monitoring the Symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease using Smartphones: A Pilot Study”, Parkinsonism and Related Disorders, 21, 650–653.
S. Arora, V. Venkataraman, A. Zhan, S. Donohue, K.M. Biglan, E.R. Dorsey, M.A. Little (2015)
“Forecasting Electricity Smart Meter Data Using Conditional Kernel Density Estimation”, Omega, forthcoming.
S. Arora and J.W. Taylor (2014)
“Cortical and Clonal Contribution of Tbr2 Expressing Progenitors in the Developing Mouse Brain”, Cerebral Cortex, forthcoming.
N.A. Vasistha, F. García-Moreno, S. Arora, A.F.P. Cheung, S.J. Arnold, E.J. Robertson and Z. Molnár (2014)
Synchronization of Coupled Map Lattice using Delayed Variable Feedback”, Journal of Applied Nonlinear Dynamics, 3, 245-253.
S. Arora and M.S. Santhanam (2014)
“Short-term Forecasting of Anomalous Load using Rule-based Triple Seasonal Methods”, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 28, 3235-3242.
S. Arora and J.W. Taylor (2013)
“Nonlinear and Nonparametric Modelling Approaches for Probabilistic Forecasting of the US Gross National Product”, Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics, 17, 395-420.
S. Arora, M.A. Little and P.E. McSharry (2013)
Vinita Govindarajan
Partnerships and Communications Manager, Oxford India Centre for Sustainable DevelopmentVinita manages OICSD’s partnerships, strategic communications, research outreach design and relationship building, and is responsible for the Centre’s operations.
She works with the Research Director on developing the Centre’s research strategy, global presence and impact.
Vinita’s research interests lie at the intersection of climate change, social movements and cities. She is interested in how vulnerable urban populations negotiate the everyday effects of environmental change amid social and political conflict.
Previously, Vinita worked as a journalist in India for online newspaper Scroll.in, with a focus on environmental and urban policy. In 2020, she received the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award for Environment, Science and Technology reporting for co-authoring an investigative series on pesticide regulation in India.
Vinita holds an MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance (with Distinction) from the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford.
Alfred Gathorne-Hardy
Senior Research Fellow, Oxford India Centre for Sustainable DevelopmentAlfred Gathorne-Hardy is Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development.
His career has spanned academia, consultancy, parliament and government including a secondment to Defra to develop the Government’s Bioenergy Sustainability Criteria. His academic research examines the interactions and trade-offs between different players in socio-ecological systems. He received his doctorate from Imperial College before coming to Oxford in 2011 to study the Indian food system.
Research Interests
What will you eat for supper tonight? Pasta due to fussy children, or raw vegetables for health? Perhaps you’ll avoid meat due to cultural/religious views, or maybe you don’t mind what you eat as long as there’s plenty of it at a good price. Then again maybe you’re not in a position to choose – maybe you’re one of the 2 billion who don’t have access to adequate food, let alone the ability to choose from the enormous variety we are familiar with in the west.
Whatever your do, you are part of the global food system, both driving impacts and vulnerable to what the system throws at you. Your decisions will influence not only local issues such as your health and wallet, but also global factors including the rate of agricultural expansion into biodiverse rich habitats; the employment and job qualities of those working in the world’s largest sector; the aesthetics of landscapes as well as climate change, and energy use and numerous other factors. Equally your ability to buy adequate food is impacted by your employment conditions, the global economy, resistance of pests to pesticides, national food policies and the ability of the food system to respond to biotic and abiotic shocks around the world.
It is the complexity of this push- and pull- relationship that I’m fascinated by. While most of us want to reduce our environmental impacts, which aspects of the environment are most important? Once we’ve made these decisions of what we value, how can we measure them? And if do measure them, what can we do about trade-offs: which is more important, our love of certain foods, the working conditions of those that produce them, climate change, biodiversity?
Pulling in the right direction – the carbon, economic and labour implications of tractors vs bullocks, and manure vs urea. Ambio
Gathorne-Hardy, A and Harriss-White, B.
The environmental, economic and social impacts of organic rice compared to conventional rice in South India: Ecological Economics
Gathorne-Hardy, A and Harriss-White, B.
System of Rice Intensification provides environmental and economic gains but at the expense of social sustainability—A multidisciplinary analysis in India. Agricultural Systems, 2016. 143: p. 159-168.
Gathorne-Hardy, A., et al.
A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of greenhouse gas emissions from SRI and flooded rice production in SE India. Taiwan Journal of Water Conservancy 2013. 61(4): p. 120-125
Gathorne-Hardy, A., D.N. Reddy, and B. Harriss-White
Embodied Emissions and Dis‐Embodied Jobs: The Environmental, Social and Economic Implications of the Rice Production‐Supply Chain in South East India. Technology, Jobs and a Low Carbon Future, New Delhi, India. June 2013.
Gathorne-Hardy, A. 2013.
Resources, greenhouse gases, technology and jobs in India’s informal economy – the case of rice. Towards greening the economy, Institute of Economic Growth. 22nd February, 2012. Conference proceedings
Hema, R, Gathorne-Hardy, A., Harriss-White, B,. 2012.
Anant Jani
Associate, Oxford India Centre for Sustainable DevelopmentAnant’s research is focused on understanding how we can improve population health through social prescriptions and by addressing social determinants of health.
Given the negative impact of severe heat on morbidity and mortality, he sees access to cooling (both passive and active) as a social determinant of health and cooling as a potential healthcare intervention. In this capacity he works with the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Cooling, which is co-lead by the Research Director of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, Radhika Khosla.
Prior to his position at the University of Oxford, Anant worked in Europe and the Middle East to help healthcare systems within these countries to focus more on value-based healthcare. Anant has a PhD in immunology from Yale University.
Debottam T. Bose Esq.
Senior Legal Consultant, Oxford India Centre for Sustainable DevelopmentDebottam T. Bose is a project finance lawyer by training, having worked in international law firms like Skadden, Arps, Slate Meagher & Flom LLP (London) and White & Case LLP (London).
He studied art history in London at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) and then went on to develop a niche consultancy, with a focus on international art, finance and philanthropy. He divides his time between New York, London, Oxford, Paris, New Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta and Singapore.
Interconnections of art, philanthropy and advocacy has allowed his practice along with independent teams of diverse professionals to be involved in advising a cross section of clients from private collectors, family offices, artists, hospitals, museums and universities.
Maan Barua
Associate, Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development; University Lecturer in Human Geography, Cambridge UniversityMaan is a University Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge, and a research affiliate of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development.
Maan completed his DPhil in human geography at the School of Geography and the Environment in 2013 (Clarendon and Senior Hulme Scholar, Brasenose College). He has an undergraduate degree in the biological sciences from India (First class; 1st; honours) and an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management (Distinction), also from Oxford.
Maan’s research is situated within environmental and cultural geography, the central axis of which focuses on the spatialities, politics and governance of the living and material world. It conceptually develops two of geography’s vibrant sub-fields – more-than-human geography and political ecology – with which he has engaged through his doctoral and postdoctoral research. Maan teaches environmental and human geography at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Hid work engages political ecology and posthumanist thought to develop new understandings of the geographies of nature. Of particular interest are nonhuman ecologies and processes pertaining to production, landscape and knowledge. Maan’s ongoing and past work interrogates these ecologies through a number of empirical foci, including urban ecologies, nonhuman labour and commodity production, and historical and contemporary more-than-human geographies. A theme cutting through these empirics is the traffic between nature and capital, and more broadly, between ecology and economy.
Maan lectures on the ‘Environmental Geography’ foundation course for undergraduates, besides conducting tutorials on various human geography topics for different colleges. At postgraduate level, he co-teaches a module on ‘Conservation and Society’ on the MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management, and convenes an option ‘Urban Political Ecology’ for masters students across the School of Geography and the Environment.
Barua, M. and Jellis, T. (2018) Vocabularies for Urban Futures: Critical Reflections..
Barua, M. (2017) Nonhuman labour, encounter value, spectacular accumulation: the geographies of a lively commodity. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42(2): 274-288.
Lorimer, J., Hodgetts, T. and Barua, M. (2017) Animals’ atmospheres. Progress in Human Geography.
Barua, M. (2016) Lively commodities and encounter value. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34(4): 725-744.
Zablocki, J., Arora, S. and Barua, M. (2016) Factors affecting media coverage of species rediscoveries. Conservation Biology, 30(4): 914-917.
Barua, M. (2015) Encounter: Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities. Environmental Humanities, 7: 265-270.
Jadhav, S., Jain, S., Kannuri, N., Bayetti, C. and Barua, M. (2015) Ecologies of Suffering: Mental Health in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 50(20): 12-15.
Vikranth Harthikote Nagaraja
Associate, Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development; Postdoctoral Research Assistant, Natural Interactions Lab.Vikranth’s research primarily focuses on developing affordable prosthetic arms for low-resource settings. He is also working on collaborative projects tackling emerging topics – (i) AI/Machine Learning applications in motion analysis and musculoskeletal modelling for real-world biomechanical assessments; (ii) the potential role of telehealth and virtual care as sustainable development solutions in achieving Universal Health Coverage in India; and (iii) structured need-led design methodology for developing 3D-printed prosthetics.
- Nagaraja, V.H., Ghosh Dastidar, B., Suri, S., and Jani, A., 2022. Perspectives and use of telemedicine by doctors in India: A cross-sectional study. medRxiv.
- Ghosh Dastidar, B., Suri, S., Nagaraja, V.H., and Jani, A., 2022. A virtual bridge to Universal Healthcare in India. Communications Medicine. 2, 145.
- Nagaraja, V.H., Ghosh Moulic, S., D’souza J.V., Limesh, M., Walters, P., and Bergmann J.H., 2022. A novel respiratory control and actuation system for upper-limb prosthesis users: Clinical evaluation study. TechArxiv. 1–18.
- Nagaraja, V.H., Bergmann, J.H., Andersen, M.S., and Thompson, M.S., 2022. Comparison of a Scaled Cadaver-based Musculoskeletal Model with a Clinical Upper Extremity Model. ASME Journal of Biomechanical Engineering. 1–14.
- Dasgupta, A., Sharma, R., Mishra, C., and Nagaraja, V.H., 2022. Machine Learning for Optical Motion Capture-driven Musculoskeletal Modeling from Inertial Motion Capture Data. arXiv.
- Sharma, R., Dasgupta, A., Cheng, R., Mishra, C., and Nagaraja, V.H., 2022. Machine Learning for Musculoskeletal Modeling of Upper Extremity. IEEE Sensors Journal. 22(9), pp.18684–18697.
- Nagaraja, V.H., da Ponte Lopes, J., and Bergmann, J.H., 2022. Reimagining Prosthetic Control: A Novel Body-Powered Prosthetic System for Simultaneous Control and Actuation. Prosthesis, 4(3), pp.394–413.
- Russell, J., Bergmann, J.H., and Nagaraja, V.H., 2022. Towards Dynamic Multi-Modal Intent Sensing Using Probabilistic Sensor Networks. Sensors, 22(7), p.2603.
- Nagaraja, V.H., Cheng, R., Slater, D.H., Thompson, M.S., and Bergmann, J.H., 2022. Upper limb prosthetic maintenance data–A retrospective analysis study. JPO: Journal of Prosthetics and Orthotics. 34(4):223–232
- Nagaraja, V.H., Bergmann, J.H., Sen, D. and Thompson, M.S., 2016. Examining the needs of affordable upper limb prosthetic users in India: A questionnaire-based survey. Technology and Disability, 28(3), pp.101-110.