About the Speaker

Dr. Eswaran Sridharan
Academic Director and Chief Executive, University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India (UPIASI)

Dr. Sridharan has been leading UPIASI since its inception in 1997, and was earlier with the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. He is a political scientist with research interests in the party systems and coalition politics, political economy of development, and international relations theory and Indian foreign policy.

He has held visiting appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, London School of Economics, Institute of South Asian Studies of the National University of Singapore, and Institute of Developing Economies, Tokyo. He is the Editor of India Review, a refereed Routledge journal, and is on the Editorial Advisory Board of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics. He earned his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Sridharan has been a CASI Non-Resident Visiting Scholar since 2001.

About the Moderator

Tariq Thachil
Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI)
Associate Professor of Political Science at Penn
Madan Lal Sobti Associate Professor for the Study of Contemporary India.

Prior to arriving at Penn, Professor Thachil was Associate Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, and before that was Peter Strauss Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Stanford University (2003), and a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University (2009).

His current research focuses on the political consequences of urbanization in India. An article from this project received the 2018 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review. He writes regularly for press outlets in India, including Indian Express and Hindustan Times.

About the Moderator

Ramanan Raghavendran
Trustee, University of Pennsylvania
Chair, Governing Council of UPIASI
Managing Partner, Amasia Venture Capital

Ramanan Raghavendran serves as a Trustee of the University of Pennsylvania; as an Overseer of the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn; as Chair of the Governing Council of Penn’s Institute for the Advanced Study of India (UPIASI); as a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Advanced Study of India (CASI); and as the Global Coordinator of the Penn Alumni Interview Program.

He also serves on the Advisory Council of the Natural Capital Project at Stanford University, and is a member of the Housing and Community Development Committee of San Mateo County. He has been the seed funder and board member of several NGOs over the years and remains closely associated with Magic Bus, an NGO that works with 500,000 at-risk children in South Asia.  

Ramanan has three degrees from Penn: a B.S.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from SEAS, a B.S. in Economics from Wharton, and a Master of Liberal Arts from SAS.