I am an incoming student for the batch of 2022 at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, USA for a Master in Health Science (MHS) in Mental Health. Currently, I am working as an Associate (Research) and Lead (Communications and Outreach) with XQtiv Consulting, Mumbai essentially being on the founding team of their upcoming think tank in healthcare (XQuire). My engagements lie specifically at the intersections of mental health, economics, and public policy. I have a Master's in Public Policy (2021) and a Bachelor's in Economics (2019) from St. Xavier's College Mumbai and Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies Mumbai, respectively. My master's dissertation titled Decoding Structural Stigma against Mental Illnesses in India: An Exploratory Analysis' aimed at understanding the phenomenon and giving relevant policy recommendations through a mixed methods approach. It included the manifestations of structural stigma as affecting civil liberties of people with mental illnesses through restrictive legislations and stigmatising attitudes within the healthcare community. I am a suicide prevention volunteer with Samaritans Mumbai, a befriending and suicide prevention helpline and spend four hours a week speaking to people grappled with distress, depression, and suicidal ideation. Through my years in college, I have interned with various organisations such as Sangath India, Praja, Centre for Good Governance and Public Policy at the Department of Planning of Government of Uttarakhand. I also serve on the Youth Advisory Panel (India) for Wellcome Trust's Global Mental Health Databank Project.

I am a researcher who is currently particularly interested in evaluating the potential impact of quality physical education classes on students' mental health.

Natalia is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, where she currently is a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development. Her main research interests are in comparative politics and the political economy of development, focusing on corruption, public goods provision, and accountability in Latin America. She also studies the formation of citizen and ex-combatant attitudes and their role in stabilizing peace in post-conflict settings. In her book project, she explores the information and institutional environments that pave the way for outsider candidates’ rise and success. She holds an M.A. in Economics from the University of Los Andes (Colombia). Before coming to Berkeley, she worked at the World Bank, the Observatory of Democracy, and Colombia’s National Planning Department.

Claudia Persico is an applied policy scholar whose research focuses on environmental policy, inequality, health and education policy using causal inference methods. Persico is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an IZA Institute of Labor Economics Research Affiliate, and a Research Affiliate with the with the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Her research has recently been featured in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Labor Economics, and the Journal of Human Resources. Her current work examines the social and biological mechanisms underlying the relationships between poverty, the environment, and children’s cognitive development and health. In particular, much of her current research focuses on how early exposure to environmental pollution can cause inequality by affecting child and adult health, development, behavior, and academic achievement. She has also studied how school funding impacts long term outcomes, how school segregation affects racial disproportionalities in special education, and how childhood exposure to pollution affects academic outcomes. Her research has been covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, the Atlantic, and many other major media outlets. She was formerly an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.