Alark Saxena is currently a visiting lecturer at Yale NUS college primarily teaching on the issues of natural resource management and resilience. He is the former Program Director of Yale Himalaya Initiative, Lecturer at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Dr. Saxena is a social-ecologist who is interested in questions associated to sustainability, resilience and livelihood using a systems approach. His current research is focused in India and Nepal. In India, Dr. Saxena is developing a complex model to evaluate livelihood resilience of forest-based communities. Within Himalayas, he is modeling the impacts of tourism on local livelihood and culture in the Sagarmatha National park, Nepal. He has recently completed a Global Resilience Partnership funded project on evaluating resilience of flood affected communities living across the border between India and Nepal. Himalayas have been part of Dr. Saxena’s life since his teenage days. In his new position he looks forward to strengthening old and forging new relationships between Yale, Yale-NUS and the Himalayan region.

Brian McAdoo is Professor and College Rector, Yale-NUS College. Before joining the faculty of Yale-NUS College he was at Vassar College, where he served as Althea Ward Clark Professor of Environmental Science. He received his B.S. in Geology from Duke University and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Science from the University of Otago (New Zealand) where he was a Fulbright Scholar. During his PhD in Earth Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, McAdoo completed eight dives to the bottom of the ocean in the deep-sea research vessel Alvin while researching submarine landscape evolution. This line of research eventually led to an interest in earthquakes and tsunami- following the 2004 Indian Ocean disaster, he participated and lead post-disaster reconnaissance teams in Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Aceh (Indonesia), the US Gulf of Mexico (Hurricane Katrina), the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Java, Japan and Haiti. These disasters demonstrate the need for researchers to communicate effectively across academic disciplines, and between the academy and the public sector. McAdoo is currently working with the Partnership for Environment and Disaster Risk Reduction, United Nations Environmental Programme and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature better understand the links between ecosystems, economy and culture as they relate to Disaster Risk Reduction in Asia and beyond.

Dhritiman Mukherjee is one of the most respected and loved nature photographers in India today. He is admired for his dedication, perseverance and hard work. He is highly recognized and awarded - RBS Earth Hero Award 2014 for inspiring people with his images towards conservation, Carl Zeiss Conservation award for contribution towards conservation in 2013, along with many other national and international photographic awards.

As a professional photographer his work has been published widely and frequently in all kind of print and digital media with brands like BBC, National Geographic, Newyork Times, Lonely Planet, WWF, London Geographic, Telegraph, The Guardian to name a few. He is a passionate field guy and works across tearrain from mountain to underwater or desert to rain forest. He climbs mountains for rare species , takes to the sky to get a rare angle of a bird, dives under ice, climbs volcanos, spends days in tree canopy , dives in caves – all to get that perfect and elusive shot to make a difference. Dhritiman spends around 300 days a year in the field.

He has done at least 30 books in which he was sole or major photographer, recently one being a comprehensive coffee-table book named “Magical Biodiversity of India” by BNHS and Oxford. He is a founder members of the Indian Wildlife magazine Saevus.

Recently he was the one of the three jurors for national award for photography Government of India.

Ghazala Shahabuddin is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Ecology, Development and Research (CEDAR), Dehradun, where she is researching various aspects of decentralized forest management in the Uttarakhand Himalayas. She is particularly interested in studying impacts of land use change on forest birds in the middle Himalayas and ways of sustainable forest management. She is part of an NGO consortium that works with the Uttarakhand Forest Department to promote bird-based tourism in the state.

Dr.Shahabuddin earned her Ph.D. in conservation biology from Duke University (1998), where she studied the ecological consequences of tropical forest fragmentation for butterfly species, based in the Guri Islands of Venezuela. Subsequently, she worked with a number of research organizations and non-profits in India including the Council for Social Development and Wildlife Conservation Society-India Programme. Between 2009-14, Dr. Shahabuddin worked as an Associate Professor at the School of Human Ecology at Ambedkar University, Delhi, where she helped establish M.A. and Ph.D. programs in Environment and Development.

Dr. Shahabuddin has published extensively in scientific journals in the areas of conservation biology, ornithology, and wildlife policy. Her book, Conservation at the Crossroads: Science, Society and the Future of India’s Wildlife (Permanent Black, India, 2010), examines the science and politics of nature conservation in India.

Gopal S. Rawat is Dean, Faculty of Wildlife Sciences, Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun. His areas of research include eco-floristics especially in the alpine region of Indian Himalayan region, impacts of climate change on Himalayan ecosystems, ecology of high-altitude rangelands, wildlife habitat ecology and documentation of traditional ecological knowledge among endigenous ethnic communities in western Himalaya

Jiban Mani Poudel is Lecturer at Department of Anthropology, Tribhuvan University. He has been doing his research on farming, livestock and climate change in the Himalayan region of Nepal for the last 7 years. His most recent publication is 'Pond Becomes a Lake: Challenges Posed by Climate Change in the Trans-Himalayan Regions of Nepal.”

Kathryn Hardy teaches at Ashoka University. She is an anthropologist interested in language, mediation, and semiosis. Her research investigates emergent categories in diverse sites of social life: filmmaking, the mass celebration of Chhath Puja in Mumbai, and lives of water buffalo in Varanasi.

Her first book project examines the social categories that emerge through the production and circulation of films in the Bhojpuri language, including new ideas of the “region” and new forms of linguistically-inscribed masculinity.

Before coming to Ashoka, Kathryn was the Singh Fellow at Yale University and a Mellon Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her BA from Smith College, and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Kireet Kumar is Scientist G and Centre Head (CLWRM), G B Pant National Institute of Himalayan Environment and Sustainable Development, Almora. He started his professional career in 1986 through a World Bank sponsored Kanpur Urban Development project focusing on water and wastewater management He was later associated with the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), Delhi till Feb 1991 on various aspects of environmental quality management; Environmental Impact Assessment; Development of emission and effluent standards for asbestos and mini cement plants, stone crushers and other similar industries. In 1991, Er. Kireet Kumar joined G B Pant Institute of Himalayan Environment and Development (A Govt. of India Institution) to serve the Himalaya. He has successfully developed the monitoring network of permanent Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and weather profilers across Indian Himalaya in collaboration with MoES and CSIR. He played key role in establishment of Glacier Study Centre of the Institute to study the glacier response to climate change. Besides this, he has also been involved in various other projects and consultancies related to land and water management in Indian Himalaya under Watershed Processes and Management (WPM) and Knowledge Products and Capacity Building (KCB) themes of the Institute, as a scientist G and Group Head. Some of his accomplishments are technical papers (more than 70) and policy documents (12) on various subjects such as climate change assessment, environmental hydrology and water management, catchment area management plan for augmentation of spring water flow, Village Environment Action Plan (VEAP) for resource planning, valuation of water (ecological and economic aspects), guidelines for rain water harvesting and location planning for buildings, etc. National Mission on Himalayan Studies a Central Sector scheme of MoEF&CC is being implemented throu PMU under my supervision. Recently, I have successfully convened a Working Group of NITI AYOG on “Data and information for informed decision making for Sustainable Development of Indian Himalaya”. After obtaining Master of Technology (M. Tech.) in Environmental Engineering from I.I.T. Kanpur in 1986 he has been professionally trained on project management, EIA studies, and GPS surveys and glaciology.

Maharaj Pandit is a Professor of Environmental Studies and Dean, Faculty of Science at University of Delhi. A Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, Raj was a Visiting Senior Fellow at the National University of Singapore where he returns as Nee Ann Kongsi Distinguished Visiting Professorship in January 2019.

Raj’s research focuses on Himalayan ecology and conservation with an aim to understanding ecological patterns, biotic extinctions due to land use changes, and genomic traits influencing plant invasiveness and rarity. His studies on the impact of dams on Himalayan ecosystems are internationally recognized and his works have appeared in journals such as Science and Nature. His book – Life in the Himalaya : An Ecosystem at Risk (2017) (Harvard University Press) explores a sustainable future for Himalaya. His research group provided maiden empirical evidence of ecosystem level changes in the Himalaya due to warming resulting in species extinctions and shrinking of Himalayan alpine meadows threatening human communities. Raj is currently investigating the relationship between plant invasives and their impact on water availability in soils and rivers leading to drought conditions.

Raj is a Fellow of Indian National Science Academy, National Academy of Sciences and Linnaean Society of London.

Mahesh Rangarajan is Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Ashoka University. He has a BA in History from the University of Delhi. He has an MA and PhD from Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

He has been Professor in Modern Indian History at the University of Delhi and also taught at the universities of Cornell and Jadavpur and at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru. He has also served as Director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.

His first book, Fencing the Forest was published in 1996. His most recent work is Nature and Nation (2015). He also authored India's Wildlife History (2001) and co-authored, Towards Coexistence: People, Parks and Wildlife (2000). Three recent co-edited works are Nature Without Borders (2014), Shifting Ground (2014), and At Nature’s Edge (2018).

Pasang Yangjee Sherpa, Ph.D. (2012) is a cultural anthropologist from Nepal. Her primary research areas include human dimensions of climate change, Indigeneity, and development in the Himalayas. Her secondary research involves Sherpa diaspora in the United States and South Asia. She is currently affiliated with the South Asia Center (SAC) of Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She joined the Nepal Studies Initiative of the SAC as a visiting scholar in January of 2017 and later served as co-director. Previously, she was a lecturer in the department of anthropology at Penn State University (2013-2015) and a postdoctoral fellow at The New School (2015-2016). She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Washington State University.

Ravina Aggarwal is Director of the Columbia Global Centers | Mumbai. Prior to joining Columbia, she was a Program Officer at the Ford Foundation’s New Delhi office from 2007-2015, where she was responsible for strategic planning and grant-making for programs on development, social justice and public policy, with a focus on the fields of education, media and technology, and arts and culture.

Ravina’s work in the philanthropy sector followed a long career as a sociocultural anthropologist. After receiving her doctoral degree from Indiana University in 1994, she joined the Department of Anthropology at Smith College, where she became a tenured faculty member and also served in the Women’s Studies Program. Her research was based on extensive fieldwork in the Himalayan region of Ladakh and her areas of study and teaching included political anthropology, peace-building, cultural studies, gender, and development.

Ravina is the author of several publications on the Himalayas, including Beyond Lines of Control: Performing the Border in Ladakh, India (Duke University Press, Seagull Books) and the editor of Into the High Ranges (Penguin India) and Forsaking Paradise (Katha). She has recently completed a mystery novel for young adults set in Dehradun.

Sanjay Sondhi is a Dehradun-based naturalist. An engineer by qualification, he quit his job in 2008 to devote himself to nature conservation and environment protection. He is Founder Trustee of Titli Trust, Dehra Dun. Avifauna, Lepidoptera and Herpetofauna are his special interests. In addition to natural history writing and photography, he works on conservation projects in the western and eastern Himalayas. Currently he is associated with Lepidoptera research and conservation projects involving local communities in Uttarakhand, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya and Nagaland.

Sejal Worah has worked in the field of natural resource management and sustainable development for over 25 years. She is currently Program Director at WWF India in New Delhi, where she manages and provides strategic direction to an interdisciplinary team of over 300 professionals working on diverse issues related to environmental conservation and sustainable development. Her key area of interest, while managing WWF India’s wide-ranging program, is the interface between sustainable livelihoods, conservation and development in the light of India’s rapidly growing economy and the impacts of climate change. Over the course of her career, Dr. Worah has worked in over 20 countries in south and south-east Asia, the Pacific and east Africa. She has been associated with a number of international organizations and serves on various government committees and NGO advisory boards in India. She is a resident of Uttarakhand and has a special interest in the conservation and sustainable development of the Himalayas. Sejal is also the Managing Director of the Jabarkhet Nature Reserve, an initiative set up to demonstrate links between conservation, sustainable tourism and local livelihood development.

Sushil Ramola is a social entrepreneur and a civil society volunteer for the sustainable development, especially of India's mountain regions. He is currently President of Integrated Mountain Initiative, a civil society platform for bringing all stakeholders together around the issues of sustainability in the Indian Himalayan region and enabling collaborative action.

Sushil hails from Uttarakhand and completed his schooling from Shimla. After a long stint of leadership in the Corporate sector in India and overseas, he founded a community led rural tourism initiative DueNorth in his native village Saur in 2008. He also founded and ran a social enterprise B-ABLE which works on providing skills and meaningful livelihood opportunities to a large number of less educated and disadvantaged youth in 26 states of India.

Sushil has also engaged with many well-known civil society organisations as a mentor and member on their boards. He is a chemical engineer and IIM Ahmedabad alumnus.

Valentina Zuin is an Assistant Professor of Practice in Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. Through her work she is interested in making cities more livable and sustainable, especially for the poor. Her specific interests include water and sanitation planning and policies, informality, slum upgrading and sustainable urban service provision in developing country settings. Dr Zuin holds a PhD in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources from Stanford University, and a Master’s in Urban Planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She has a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration and International Institutions Management from Bocconi University in Milan Italy. Before joining Yale-NUS as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2017, Dr Zuin was an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Ashoka University in New Delhi, India.