Asha Stanford

Shripad Tuljapurkar is Professor of Biology and the Dean & Virginia Morrison Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University. His research areas include stochastic dynamics of human and natural populations; prehistoric societies; and probability forecasts including sex ratios, mortality, aging and fiscal balance.
Tuljapurkar directs Stanford’s Center for Population Research and the demography program at Stanford’s Center for the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. He is a member of the Center for the Demography and Economics of Aging at the University of California, Berkeley. He has led a panel on aging for the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and served on the Technical Advisory Panel to the US Social Security Administration. He received the 1996 Mindel Sheps Award from the Population Association of America, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998.

Nihar Kothari is the Director and Executive Editor of the Patrika group of companies.
Vivek Srinivasan is the manager of the Liberation Technology Program at Stanford University.
The panel will feature two anti-corruption initiatives focused on the grassroots in India. One uses mobile phones to fight corruption in rural India led by Stanford University. The second is a highly localized regional language media that takes up issues of corruption. The speakers will present their experiences and discuss the advantages and problems of using media and technology to fight corruption.

Sumit Bhargava is a Clinical Associate Professor in Pediatrics with a focus in Pulmonary Medicine at Stanford University. He has worked on research projects on topics including epidemiology and cohort studies such as the “New Delhi Birth Cohort Study”.

S. V. Mahadevan is an Associate Professor of Surgery with a focus in Emergency Medicine at Stanford University. He will give a talk on the state of emergency services in India.

Karl Mehta has over 20 years of experience in founding, funding and building technology businesses from the ground-up. He is currently a venture partner at Menlo Ventures. Previously, he was the Founder & CEO of PlaySpan Inc., acquired in the March of 2011 by Visa Inc., the world’s largest payment network. Karl served as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow, selected by the Obama Administration during the inaugural 2012-13 term. He was also the Ernst & Young “Entrepreneur of Year” 2010 for Northern California/SF Bay Area.
Prof. Vijay Pande is currently the Director of the Program in Biophysics and a Professor of Chemistry and (by courtesy) of Structural Biology and of Computer Science at Stanford University. His current research centers on the development and application of novel cloud computing simulation techniques to address problems in chemical biology.

Originally scheduled for this speaker session, Dr. Piya Sorcar is the founder and CEO of TeachAIDS, and also an Adjunct Affiliate at Stanford’s School of Medicine and a Visiting Scholar in Stanford’s Department of Communication. Unfortunately, she is currently traveling in India and will be unable to talk during this speaker session.
Ankita Patro is a Senior Manager at TeachAIDS who has worked with TeachAIDS since its inception. A Stanford graduate, Ankita has spoken on behalf of TeachAIDS internationally many times. She has worked on the TeachAIDS’ Indian animations and will provide invaluable insight into the behind-the-scenes of the TeachAIDS process.

Dr. Kohl S. Gill is the CEO and Founder of LaborVoices, Inc., a start-up company providing information services to global workers and supply-chain managers. Dr. Gill served as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow for the U.S. Departments of Energy and State. More recently, he has served as the South Asia and Middle East Labor Affairs Officer for the Office of International Labor and Corporate Social Responsibility in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Prior to federal service, Dr. Gill was an Indicorps Fellow in the slum areas of Delhi, India, serving as a volunteer paralegal with local residents, using transparency legislation to fight both petty and grand corruption at the local level.

Dr. Atanu Dey studied economics at the University of California at Berkeley and received his PhD for his thesis on the Indian telecommunications sector. He developed the “Rural Infrastructure and Services Commons (RISC)” model that promises to bring about the economic transformation of rural India.

Grant Miller, PHD, MPP, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine and a Faculty Fellow of the Stanford Center for International Development. Dr. Miller’s current research focuses broadly on behavioral obstacles to health improvement in developing countries. One line of studies investigates household decision-making underlying puzzlingly low adoption rates of highly efficacious health technologies (like point-of-use drinking water disinfectants and improved cookstoves) in many poor countries.

Viji Dilip, with her deep passion for bringing education and information to the print-disabled community, launched the US chapter of Vidyavrikshah in 2007. Now called Access Braille, the organization’s vision is to make sure that every visually impaired child has equitable access to education.

Brij Kothari has leveraged the ubiquitous presence of television in rural India and the billion-strong Indian population’s voracious appetite for film songs to infuse reading practice into entertainment. By creating a technological tool devoid of any major infrastructural inputs and hence easily replicable, Brij has demonstrated a model that can spread globally.

Amb. N Parthasarathi is the current Consul General of India in San Francisco. Amb. Parthasarathi joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1981 and has served as a diplomat in countries throughout the world including in South Korea, Senegal, Pakistan, Belgium and United Kingdom. He was the Head of the Gulf Division in the Ministry of external Affairs and he has served in Syria. He has also served in different capacities in the Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of Finance (Department of Economic Affairs) in New Delhi.