Vinay Nagaraju

Vinay is the Executive Director of Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD India at IFMR). He leads the overall administration of our rapidly growing initiative based in New Delhi with program activities in India and Nepal. He oversees the core teams and helps manage the research programs by providing strategic leadership alongside our partners at Yale University.

Prior to joining EPoD India at IFMR, he was a Quantitative Methods Instructor, at Harvard Kennedy School, Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and a Democracy Governance Fellow at Harvard’s Ash Center. He is a Visiting Professor at the African Development University.

Vinay graduated from Harvard Kennedy School’s Mid-Career MPA as an Edward S. Mason Fellow (2017). He holds an MBA from University of Oxford (2009) and a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from Bangalore University (2001). He is a StartingBloc Social Innovation Fellow (2007).

Vinay has over fifteen years of professional experience in leadership and strategic management roles, and academia. His international development work as COO of ‘Riders for Health’, hailed as the 7th most innovative NGO in the world, includes strategy, governance, operations, innovative finance, and advocacy. He led a team that helped set-up a medical specimen transport system for Ebola testing in Freetown, Sierra Leone, liaising with multiple stakeholders. His experience in Africa includes working in The Gambia, Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Lesotho. Prior to this role, he worked for six years with Honeywell as a computer science engineer in the Aerospace domain, progressing into project management, strategy and leadership in key organisational initiatives. Earlier in his career, he co-founded and scaled ‘Spandana’ an education non-profit in Bangalore, India.