About

Dr. Jha holds a PhD from the Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University, Sweden. He completed his MPhil and Master’s degrees at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and earned his undergraduate degree in Agricultural Science through the prestigious Indian Council of Agricultural Research.
An interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Jha works at the intersection of urban studies, public policy, governance, and social change. His research has been published in globally renowned and highly respected journals such as Political Geography, The British Journal of Social Work, and the Community Development Journal, as well as with leading academic publishers like Orient Blackswan. He has led multiple research projects across four continents and received several international fellowships in recognition of his work.
Dr. Jha is passionate about mentoring students and shaping future-ready professionals committed to building a better society.

Dr. Imroze Khan is an Associate Professor of Biology at Ashoka University. He is an evolutionary immunologist with a special focus on understanding the selective forces that determine adaptive evolution of immune responses and evolutionary basis of host-pathogen interactions. His research combines diverse approaches – the use of experimental evolution and life history analyses, genomics, physiological and molecular manipulations to assess evolutionary and ecological outcomes. Among his other interests is to study the parallelism between evolutionary concepts and the cultural history of the world, and integrating the two within the framework of liberal education. He believes that evolutionary biology is a discipline that easily straddles the domains of natural sciences and humanities: it is a subject with historical implications and often has to grapple with the challenge of having to derive logical inferences from natural ‘experiments’ without the luxury of replication in reality, as is the case with history.
He did his Bachelors in Chemistry at St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta and Masters in Biochemistry at University of Calcutta. He did his doctoral studies in Evolutionary Biology at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata. Before joining Ashoka, Imroze was a postdoctoral fellow at National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore and a visiting researcher at the Free University of Berlin.

Dr. Aalok Thakkar is an Assistant Professor at the Ashoka School of Advanced Computing and an Alt-Carbon Darjeeling Revival Fellow at Ashoka University. He works on the applications of formal logic to programming languages, automated verification, and program synthesis. He is also actively engaged in computer science pedagogy and is committed to advancing accessibility in computing education. He received his PhD in 2023 from the University of Pennsylvania, advised by Rajeev Alur and Mayur Naik. During this time, he developed the Example-Guided framework for program synthesis. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Chennai Mathematical Institute.

Kumarjit Saha is a PhD (2016) from Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the TIFR Center for Applicable Mathematics, Bangalore.
His research interests include random graph and their scaling limits, interacting particle systems, stochastic geometry and first passage percolation. He did M.Stat from ISI, Delhi center. His current research focuses on stochastic geometry related questions for determinantal point processes.

Laasya Samhita is an assistant professor at Ashoka university in India. She is trained in microbial genetics and evolution. She earned her PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Subsequently, she worked as a freelance science writer internationally for one year. She was then a Wellcome trust/DBT early career fellow for six years, working at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru with a brief stint at Uppsala university, Sweden. Her lab works on the theme of non-genetic variation and adaptation. Specifically, their work centres around protein synthesis errors (mistranslation) and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacteria.

Chirag is a quantum physicist turned sustainability scientist: He holds a PhD in Earth Science (2017) from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany, and a second PhD in Photonics (2013) from the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain.
Chirag’s research interests span climate and sustainability science, and their implications for human development. He was a co-author of India’s first official climate change assessment report released by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, MoES, Pune in 2020. He was a contributing author to the IPCC AR6’s Atlas (2021).