Sharon has extensive experience in building important partnerships between academia, donor agencies, policymakers and practitioners to promote evidence-based policy making and practice at scale. She has hands-on experience in research and analytics, and is a Principal Investigator on several IFMR LEAD studies as well. Prior to joining IFMR LEAD, Sharon was an Economist with the Analysis Group in Montreal, Canada.

Sharon holds a Master’s Degree in Social Research Methods from the London School of Economics & Political Science, and a Master’s Degree in Economics from the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Previously, she has worked with CGAP and Accion on customer centric business models for low-income segments. As the CEO of IFMR Mezzanine Finance, Jayshree managed an investment portfolio of USD 2 million with zero default. A graduate from MDI Gurgaon, Jayshree is a Chevening Fellow from King’s College, London.

Previously, she has worked with BBC Media Action in India to lead their research on an HIV/AIDS project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Varinder also has significant experience in strategy design and impact evaluations of corporate social responsibility projects, with organizations such as Unilever, Marico and Reliance.

His core areas of work are project design, implementation and monitoring & evaluation. John has 10 years of experience in the Development Sector and has worked at Tata Consultancy Services on an Entrepreneurship Development program. John holds a Master’s degree from the Madras School of Social Work and a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from the Madras university.

Badal has a deep industry background in financial services, digital payments and online commerce. Previously, he was a Vice President at Snapdeal where he built an Omnichannel business from ground up; a Group Product Head at Intuit’s Quickbooks business unit where he crafted new fintech products; an Engagement Manager at McKinsey’s financial services and payments practice where he advised Fortune 50 companies on innovation strategies; and an Economist at the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program where he led a ground breaking a new initiative focused on public accountability in urban service delivery.

He is a technology enthusiast, an active angel investor, and once played for a NYC based rock band. He has an MBA from the Yale School of Management.

Alok has 22 years of global experience in fintech solutions. He was COO, India, at World Resources Institute where he set up global work in urban innovation and tools. Before that he was member of the startup team at UIDAI driving program strategy and implementation of Aadhaar – the world’s largest biometric-based online identity platform for 1.2 billion Indians — enabling roll out of the Aadhaar-based payment platform and effective delivery of welfare services. Prior to UIDAI, he took two fintech ventures to the Indian market as a founding team member. Earlier, he worked in the U.S. for 10 years with Trend Micro, managing global IT strategy, and DiamondCluster, developing and executing digital strategies for Fortune 50 companies.

He has an Electronic Commerce management degree from Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University and Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering.

Previously, while with the Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI), Sudhir headed its Financial Inclusion initiative (Poorest States Inclusive Growth program) in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, focusing on increasing access to financial services among poor households. As an entrepreneur, Sudhir initiated his own Urban Microfinance Company called MITRA in Rajasthan, providing financial services to urban poor. He has also worked closely with industry associations on policy and advocacy issues and with client-beneficiaries in urban and rural Rajasthan to generate linkages with livelihoods.

He is a postgraduate from the Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM).

Passionate about evidence-based conversations and storytelling, he has co-created community media initiatives and digital platforms for public engagement for inclusion and social change. Parvinder has worked with some of the leading development organizations like ActionAid, Oxfam, Christian Aid International, Plan International and Landesa among others. He loves contributing to the on-going public discourses through his writings and has been published in academic journals and international news media.

Sapna has been a pilot team member at global investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Nomura, and their set up and start up story in India. With over 11 years of experience across transition, operations and execution of large-scale business transformation programs, her noteworthy engagements involved the roll out of new bank branch set ups for equity and fixed income businesses in Mauritius, Singapore, Indonesia and China. In her last stint at Nomura, she was instrumental in front-to-back program management, business analysis and user-acceptance testing for projects such as delivery of India FII Proprietary Trading business roll-out. Prior to Nomura, Sapna was a business analyst at Goldman Sachs and established a center of excellence reconciliation platform for Lehman’s global businesses.

Sapna holds a Bachelor in Commerce Degree, an MBA from the Symbiosis University, Pune and is Six Sigma Green Belt certified.

Before Catalyst, Mandar worked with the Finance Research Group at IGIDR (Mumbai) on a Paypal-funded assignment authoring and disseminating policy research, op-ed pieces and curating round tables towards policy advocacy. Earlier, he was at the Bharti Institute Of Public Policy (Indian School Of Business) where he published financial regulatory research in banking, payments and fintech. A graduate of Columbia Law School and Govt. Law College (Mumbai) he practiced Transaction Law in an earlier life, before the policy bug bit him. When he is not thinking about pushing payments, you would find him watching Ken Burns’ documentaries or Quentin Tarantino creations.

For over 10 years, Aditya has handled a wide range of roles including consulting, academics and entrepreneurship. Previously, he was working with GREX as Associate Vice President and handled the ground-up development of debt products for the company. He was responsible for many key partnerships for GREX and also handled various special initiatives, as part of the PMO team earlier. After a brief stint with Satyam as WRAP consultant, he moved to academics and subsequently became part of the entrepreneurship ecosystem while working with a Pune based VC firm and later his own startup in the incubation space.

He is an Electronics Engineer and also has a PG Diploma in Management from IMT, Nagpur. He loves working on product ideas and building strong partnerships for organizational growth. Aditya enjoys reading and conquering difficult terrain with his prized 4×4 in his free time. He also enjoys traveling, photography and horse riding.

Arbind has a post graduate degree in E-Governance from IIM Indore, and has an experience of over 6 years in business consulting and ICT Solutions for various Government Ministries and Departments. At his last held designation as a Consultant for Business Process & IT and an Advisory Consultant, he has been a key driver of business strategy, transformation and operational improvement. He has also been associated with National Institute for Smart Government, Bluefrog mobile technologies Pvt. Ltd and IIM Indore. Prior to joining Catalyst, he has been a part of

Prior to his association with Catalyst, he was a part of the National Institute for Smart Government (NISG) New Delhi, where he was associated with various Ministries and Govt. departments, which included Controller General of Defence (MoD), Department of Finance (Govt. of Bihar), Election Commission of India, Ministry of Labour and Employment, Punjab Governance Reforms and others. During his free time, Arbind enjoys cooking, designing, watching movies and trying new cuisines.

His involvement with various Ministries and Govt. Departments are in the area of Rural Development, Health and Treasury Management. As a consultant, Arbind was involved in designing workflow-based business processes for the Government to create transparency, and as a Management Consultant, he was a part of conceptualizing, designing, and monitoring the E- Governance Project.

Aparajita was one of the four Indians selected for the Faiths Act Fellowship by the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. Prior to that, she was a LAMP Fellow and worked as a Legislative Assistant to Mr. N.K. Singh, Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha. Most recently, she was Manager, Corporate Affairs and Communications at Snapdeal where she was responsible for media messaging and engagement, in addition to providing inputs on policy and legislative issues concerning the digital commerce sector. She also developed and managed partnerships with many state governments for Snapdeal.

A street theatre artist in her undergraduate years, Aparajita was instrumental in seeding ‘Manthan’ – an annual congregation of street theatre student groups to spread social awareness across India. Manthan has now expanded to 15+ towns and cities.

She is an alumnus of Oxford University and College of Business Studies at Delhi University.

Vaisnavi has worked with various international organizations on research projects focused on the development sector while undertaking her Masters degree. She worked at the United Nations Population Fund Headquarters in New York where she was involved in designing and coordinating evaluation studies of global projects. During this time, she worked with UNICEF and UN Women on evaluation of a jointly operated project to address female genital mutilation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to this, she worked with faculty at the University of Alberta on projects ranging from safe needle exchange programs for addicts to special after-school programs for at-risk children. As a volunteer, Vaisnavi worked with sex workers’ union and human rights activist groups. She specializes on solutions that have a strong data analytical backbone in the development sector.

Vaisnavi recently completed her Master degree in Public Health from University of Alberta, Canada.

Arindam has developed analytical frameworks for problems ranging from performance and strategy evaluation in Twenty20 cricket, to identifying possible locations for the new capital of the bifurcated state of Andhra Pradesh, to assessing credit risk in data-poor lending networks, to proving cartel and monopolistic behaviour in markets. Arindam also has a keen interest in developing data pipelines, with a specific interest in data quality and value add – in his time with Indian Institute for Human Settlements, he was instrumental in developing a spatiotemporal database panning sources from Census of India to remote sensing imagery from NASA and ISRO. In his free time, Arindam loves following long form cricket from across the globe, cooking, and analysing films.

Preeti previously worked with FHI360 where she gained exposure to the development sector. Earlier, at Jayanita Exports, she was exposed to work with global buyers for handicraft export and import. Before that, at Alar Impex Pvt. Ltd., she was working with the Belgian government on importing dredging machines from Belgium. Her first experience was interesting: she started her career with SSC as an invigilator for initial paper checks.

She has an Economics degree from Delhi University, and an Office Management and Secretarial Diploma from YMCA as well as an Operational Management diploma from MIT.

Sunil has worked with Snapdeal in the capacity of Brand Alliances Manager. He has also worked to pilot the Omni channel form of retail in the e-commerce space. Prior to that, he has worked with Cognizant as a Business Intelligence consultant for clients ranging from the publications to banks to telecom sectors.

He is an alumnus of Mudra Institute of Communications (MICA), Ahmedabad and National Institute of Technology, Raipur.

Tunisha has valuable work experience in both the corporate as well as the development sector. She worked as a Senior Research Associate with Consumer Unity and Trust Society for two years handling policy and regulatory research. Prior to that she worked with IMRB International for three years and was responsible for end-to-end project management. She handled both quantitative as well as qualitative studies in the areas of brand health checks as well as communication evaluations.

Tunisha has a management degree from Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad (MICA).

During Darshan’s tenure at DA, he played a leadership role in the creation of ecosystem development for fly ash brick industry, enterprise development, creation of market linkages and integrated village development with HUL and Bharat Oman Refineries Limited. His business proposal on Rural Home Stays in Madhya Pradesh “Homes of India” was selected by IIM- Calcutta as a semi-finalist entry to TATA Social Enterprise Challenge and he was offered the Entrepreneurship Development Program at IIM-Calcutta on incubation. As an independent consultant, he has helped non-profit organizations with fundraising and marketing strategies. He has also independently conducted marketing activation campaigns for various corporates.

Darshan’s education background is in economics and international business management.