Published by Prof. John P.A. Loannidis and his colleagues at Stanford University, the list consists of researchers from different countries and research fields.

Professor (Dr.) Maharaj Pandit is also Director of Global Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, JGU. A former Radcliffe Fellow, Harvard University, and Chair/Dean, Research, Dean, Faculty of Science, Professor and Chair, Department of Environmental Studies and the Director of the Centre for Inter-Disciplinary Studies of Mountain & Hill Environment at the University of Delhi, he has received this outstanding recognition as a prolific scholar, an active researcher and an inspiring teacher. His research has been widely published in the world’s most reputed and influential journals including Nature and Science. Professor Pandit is one of those rare scholars who has been able to link his research work and academic interest in sciences to humanities and social sciences. For his outstanding contribution to the field, Prof. Pandit was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, USA last year (2022).

Dean Pandit’s research focuses on Himalayan ecology, conservation and sustainability that follows a synthesis approach to understanding ecological patterns, and biotic extinctions driven by changes in land use due to large-scale development projects such as dams. He pioneered studies on genomic traits influencing plant invasiveness and rarity and is recognised as a global leader in the field. Dean Pandit is internationally recognised for his research on the impact of land use changes, large-scale development, and climate change on the Himalayan biodiversity, ecosystems and the region as a whole.

The Founding Vice Chancellor of JGU, Professor (Dr.) C. Raj Kumar, lauded the unique honour and said, “This is a distinguished recognition from one of the leading institutions in the world today. The recognition brings great honour to JGU and its notable and illustrious faculty members such as Dr. Pandit to be named in such an eminent list which recognises some of the most outstanding members of the science community. We are fortunate that Dr. Pandit leads our School of Environment and Sustainability and brings with him global acclaim and international expertise which directly benefits our institution and our students. I congratulate him on this singular recognition.”

Dean Pandit is Ngee Ann Kongsi Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore, a position he also held in 2019. He was Visiting Senior Fellow in the University Scholars Programme and holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. He is also an Adjunct Full Professor in the Department of Natural Resources Science at the University of Rhode Island. He earned his Ph.D. at University of Delhi and is a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi and National Academy of Sciences of India. Dean Pandit is an International member to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the field of biological sciences.

The book from Springer Nature, Economic Windows series can be accessed here:[]

The book is co-edited by Professor Naresh Singh and Professor Sudip Patra along with renowned scientist and economist Professor Anirban Chakrabarty and Professor Emmanuel Haven, respectively. Well-known figures like Professor Brian Arthur (pioneering complexity economist, Santa Fe, USA) and Professor Andrei Khrennikov (quantum-like modelling pioneer, Sweden) have contributed to the book.

This recognition was bestowed upon Dr. Nair at the opening ceremony of the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology held from November 15 to 18 in Philadelphia, USA. The IASOC, or the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime, presents this award to honour outstanding doctoral theses or dissertations successfully defended within three years prior to the award year.

The IASOC, a vibrant network of scholars, professionals, and students, is dedicated to advancing the study of organised crime and illicit enterprises. The IASOC operates under the Secretariat of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, maintaining a close partnership with the Steering Committee.

Dr. Nair’s accomplishment bears testimony to his commitment towards vulnerable individuals and victims of commercial sexual exploitation. His doctoral thesis has made significant contributions to our understanding of coping mechanisms and pathways to recovery for those affected by this devastating crime.

The book is a novel thesis based on quantum-like cognitive modelling as well as insights from Eastern philosophical traditions, with its applications to decision science, and social sciences, with policy decision insights.

Read more about the book: [here]

In  the book, the author describes why India lags behind even its poorer neighbours on basic human development indicators due to overlapping inequalities of caste, class and gender. She draws evidence from a unique survey she conducted for her doctoral research on healthcare, education, nutrition and sanitation across three countries: India (Bihar), Bangladesh and Nepal. The book includes historically comparative research on Sri Lanka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

The book is now available across Indian bookstores and online on  and currently on Kindle in the ,Ěý.

So far, articles about the book have been published in the  and long extracts have appeared in the ,Ěý,ĚýĚý˛š˛ÔťĺĚý.

The Education Alumni Early-Career Award honours and recognises Melbourne graduates who have excelled in their fields while also making significant contributions to the faculty, the university, or their communities. The award is presented annually, and nominations are assessed by a panel of faculty academic and professional staff. The award is open to all alumni who have graduated from any Faculty of Education course in the eight years before January of the year in which the award is conferred.

Prof. (Dr.) Mukherjee received the award on the eighth year post-PhD for making significant contribution in the field of international and comparative education. She has published over 30 internationally peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters and a co-edited book with reputed publishers, such as Routledge, Brill-Sense, Sage, Springer and Oxford University Press. She has also worked as educational consultant with national and global organisations, such as NCERT, UNESCO-IIEP and the World Bank.

She has received a couple of research grants from JGU leading to the completion of research projects and several publications. Recently she received a major research grant from the Indian Council of Social Science Research, Government of India. She has been also appointed as Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the University of Melbourne and featured in the  section of the Australian Researcher Cooperation Hub.

Professor Mehta is a polymath and his work spans across multiple disciplines and indeed multiple worlds. He comes to JGU with a vast experience of working in some of the world’s leading institutions. His academic qualifications are truly outstanding and reflect his global reputation and standing. His research contributions are stellar, some of which are pioneering and transformative.

Professor Mehta will take up his appointment at JGU in the Fall of 2024 and will provide leadership and mentorship on teaching, research and institution building at JGU. Professor Mehta will be teaching several interdisciplinary courses, including one course specifically for the Jindal Global Business School. He will serve as a Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Higher Education Research & Capacity Building.

Professor Mehta received his academic qualifications from some of the leading universities in the world. His BA and MA are from Delhi University (St. Stephen’s College and Delhi School of Economics, respectively), his M.Phil. is from Balliol College, University of Oxford, and his Ph.D. is from the Economics Department at Harvard University.

Professor Mehta has authored or co-authored proposals that brought over multiple million dollars of research funding to Purdue University from the National Science Foundation, the 21st Century Fund, Microsoft, Intel, and others. He has been on over 25 doctoral dissertation committees. He is also an award-winning teacher, successfully teaching undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students. He has been on over two dozen doctoral committees. He has been awarded one of Purdue University’s highest awards, the Class of 1922 Award for Teaching, Innovation, and Helping Students Learn. He received the Rector’s Prize, Delhi University’s highest honour, and was an INLAKS Scholar at Oxford University.

Professor Mehta is currently the President and Director of MICA and a Distinguished Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, where he completes a seven-year term on May 31, 2024, after which he joins JGU. His prior appointments were as Chairman of the Board of Management at Auro University, where he was Acting Vice Chancellor and Distinguished Professor of Strategy, and as Provost/Vice Chancellor of Ahmedabad University. He returned to India in 2006/7 to head the collaboration between Duke CE (Duke University’s Corporate Education Arm) and IIM-Ahmedabad as Regional Managing Director for India, West Asia, and the Middle East and as Visiting Professor of Business Policy at IIM-Ahmedabad. Before that, he was at Purdue University for 16 years, where he taught Economics and Strategic Management. For six years, he led Purdue’s Entrepreneurship Initiative, as part of which he organised the flagship Entrepreneurial Competition and, in the process, worked with over 200 teams of students on their business plans, several of whom went on to get venture funding. The programme he set up was rated among the top programmes in the world.

Professor Mehta is stepping down from administration to focus full-time on research at JGU, with some time devoted to creating new, globally unique, and cutting-edge courses. His primary focus will be bringing his decade-long research in a book that details the origin and development of the university form in India between 600 BC and 1200 AD and its global impact via transmission to Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe (via Jerusalem), where it influenced the founding of European Universities including Oxford and Paris.

Over the years, Professor Mehta has consulted with and taught senior executives worldwide, including executives from North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia (including CEOs in Pakistan). The companies that he has worked with include Bharat Petroleum, Black Management Forum of South Africa, Eli Lilly, Genpact, Honeywell, IBM, Infosys, Lockheed Martin, Medtronic, Microsoft, P&G, Price Waterhouse Coopers, State Bank of India, and Tata Group, among others. He has conducted long-range scenario planning, envisioning, and simulation exercises with numerous government and industry executives. At IIM-Ahmedabad, he continues to teach one of the few courses anywhere on Strategy Execution and the Art and Science of Creating High Performance. His experience as the head of the collaboration between Duke University’s Corporate Education arm (Duke CE) and IIM-Ahmedabad gave him a ringside view of the strategic challenges faced by the senior leadership of some of the largest corporations in India and the world. Working with their senior leadership at the board level, he actively designed and developed executive education interventions that developed their key people.

According to a paper by Sahoo, Singh, Mishra, and Sankaran (2015) from IIM-Bangalore and XIM-Bhubaneshwar, in terms of global impact, Professor Mehta is rated as one of the top researchers in the field of Strategy in India.

Professor Mehta has extensively researched Entrepreneurship, Industrial Organisation, Information Economics, and Experimental Economics. His research was the subject of a full-length review by the Economist. His work on creating world-class universities has been discussed worldwide and profiled in over 10 languages, including Chinese, Russian, French, German, and Arabic. He has a new book coming out,ĚýGlobal Governance Futures: Digital Transformation and Democratic Reform, Routledge Publishers, USA (Taylor and Francis Group), jointly edited with Preeti Shroff, Jagdish Sheth, and John Garrison.

Over the last 10 years, Professor Mehta has served on the boards of three publicly listed companies. In each case, he has helped to deepen and broaden the conversations around the formulation and implementation of the strategy.

Professor Mehta has been a member of several high-powered committees the Government of India convened. He has conducted several programmes for senior civil servants, including IRS, IFS, and IAS officers, including one for all the Secretaries to the Government of India. He is currently serving as Vice-Chairman of the Governing Council of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. He sits on many Committees of the Government of India.

Professor Mehta has co-founded two hi-tech start-ups while being a full-time professor and academic leader. The first one, Simulex, was set up in the US in 1999 to develop one of the largest gaming and simulation platforms for social, political, and economic modeling for major global corporations and the US government. That company was successfully sold some years later. After his return to India, he co-founded another high-tech Financial Services start-up, S-Ancial, which is now scaling up and going global. These twin experiences help him in bringing the entrepreneurial perspective to a wide variety of organisations.

Adam’s Bridge offers the first comprehensive transdisciplinary study of the famous eponymous tombolo (also known as Ram Setu) combining its sacral, historical, geological, political, performative, and heritage aspects into one framework, viewed under the critical lenses of island studies and cultural theory. It elucidates the entanglement of Adam’s Bridge’s discursive history with India’s colonial history, contemporary geology, domestic politics, and the nation’s emerging position in a complex geopolitical order in and around the Indian Ocean region vis-à-vis increasing Sino-American involvement in Indo-Sri Lankan relations.

Without foregrounding any absolute scientific claims on the location of the sandbars that inspired sage Valmiki’s Ram Setu and the Ramayan legacy or hindering narratives of religious faiths and folklore revolving around the structure, this intellectual historiography traces the parallel evolution of traditions of compassionate questioning and devotion for Indic sacred beliefs among commentators across the millennia from both Indian and non-Indian spectra, seen in juxtaposition with the biotic and abiotic diversity of the Gulf of Mannar and Palk Bay. Beyond secular-versus-religious debates,ĚýAdam’s Bridge will be of interest to scholars of ocean and island studies, coastal economies, archipelagic geographies, environmental history, heritage studies, colonial studies, and cultural theory.

Adam’s Bridge unifies a consortium of themes, ranging across ecological and livelihood sustainability, environmentalism, soteriology, economic and geostrategic history, and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, in conceptualising a compellingly nuanced chronicle for India’s enchanted ‘bridge’.

The book is now available across Indian bookstores and online on  and currently on Kindle in the .

Prof. Chatterjee has previously authored the widely acclaimed books,ĚýThe Purveyors of Destiny: A Cultural Biography of the Indian Railways, later republished as the now bestselling The Great Indian Railways (Bloomsbury 2017; 2019), and Indians in London: From the Birth of the East India Company to Independent India (Bloomsbury 2021).