Meet the multidisciplinary team atIHOPE
Scientific Team

Dr Raja Narayanan
Principal Investigator
Director, Suven Clinical Research Centre, L V Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad

Dr Raja Narayanan
Principal Investigator
Dr Raja Narayanan (PI) is a surgeon specialising in Vitreo Retinal Diseases. He is also the Director and Network Head of Clinical Research at LVPEI. With his expertise in clinical research and health economics, he will lead the project team and bring together all other leads into a single resource centre. He has many hours of experience in teaching clinical research at LVPEI, and has also designed and published investigator-initiated randomized clinical trials.

Dr Anthony Vipin Das
Co-Principal Investigator
Associate Director, L V Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad

Dr Anthony Vipin Das
Co-Principal Investigator
Dr Anthony Vipin Das is an Ophthalmic surgeon with a specific interest in Ocular Trauma and Community Ophthalmology. He is the innovator of EyeSmartTM Electronic Medical Record system of LVPEI. His extensive knowledge and expertise in big data analysis have resulted in numerous publications and an algorithm for myopia progression in children with myopia.

Prof Chirantan Chatterjee
Co-Principal Investigator
Reader in Economics of Innovation, SPRU, University of Sussex Business School

Prof Chirantan Chatterjee
Co-Principal Investigator
Chirantan Chatterjee is a tenured Reader in Economics of Innovation at the Science Policy Research Unit of the University of Sussex Business School. Chatterjee also maintains a visiting affiliation at IIM Ahmedabad as an Adjunct Professor in Economics and as a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Between 2018 and 2021, he was a full time associate professor in economics and strategy at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, where he held the ICICI Bank Chair in Strategic Management and was also Chairperson of the Center for Management of Health Services at IIMA.

Dr G.V. Satyanarayana Murthy
Co-Principal Investigator
Director, Indian Institute of Public Health, Hyderabad

Dr G.V. Satyanarayana Murthy
Co-Principal Investigator
Dr GVS Murthy is a renowned public health expert. He headed the Community Ophthalmology department since its inception at Dr. R.P.Centre for Ophthalmic Sciences, AIIMS. Later, he established the LSHTM Overseas Centre of Excellence. He worked at WHO, Geneva, on the Childhood Blindness Program and was a UNAIDS Consultant with National Aids Control Organization (NACO) for 2 years. He has over 300 publications in peer reviewed journals.
Advisory Board
Extended Team

Arnaz Dalal
IHOPE Project Lead
Over a career spanning 18 years, Arnaz has rich cross functional experience across multinational Fortune 500 companies as well as NGOs. Arnaz has been associated with LVPEI for the past two years working as a consultant for the Resource Mobilization and HR teams and is currently the Project Lead for I HOPE . She brings to the table her experience in Human Resource & Operations Management as part of global teams, with an established track record of people and stakeholder management.

Dr.Ponnari Gottipati
Consultant Grants Manager
Dr. Ponnari is a Research Management, Science Education and Outreach consultant. She is currently consulting for LVPEI as the Grants Manager and co-leads the Superheroes Against Superbugs public engagement initiative on antibiotic resistance. Trained in molecular biology with a PhD from University of Sheffield and Postdoc from University of Oxford, she was previously working at the DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance

Dr Anirudh G. Gudlavalleti
Senior Research Associate
Dr Anirudh is a public health professional with over 5 years of professional experience in the field of training of health workers, curriculum designing for health workers, implementing public health projects across states, managing and operating his self-founded social enterprise.

Dr Kriti Shukla
Research Fellow
Dr. Kriti is trained as an occupational therapist with a Masters in Disabilities Studies and Action from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She is a Disabilities and Public Health professional, with expertise in policy planning and management with over 6 years of experience.

Ashish Kumar
Research Associate
Ashish Kumar is working for IHOPE as a Research Associate. His previous role was that of a Research Assistant at the IIM-A , where he worked on projects at the intersection of health economics and industrial organization.He briefly worked as a Research Intern at ICTS-TIFR, Bengaluru.
He is a batch topper and has completed his Master’s degree in Economics from the Ashoka University.

Anindya S Chakrabarti
Associate Professor, Economics area
Anindya is an associate professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. He received a Ph.D. in economics from Boston University in 2015. He has published in internationally reputed journals in economics and physics such as the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Journal of Economic Behavior and organization, Quantitative Finance, Scientific Reports, Physical Review E among others. His main research interests are in economic and financial networks, business cycles, empirical industrial organization, and geometry of networks and complex systems. He is serving as a co-chairperson of the Brij Disa Center for Data Science and AI, and he is currently the UTI chair professor in macroeconomics at IIM Ahmedabad.

Sawan Rathi
PhD Student in Economics Area
Sawan Rathi is a Ph.D. student in the Economics area at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Economics department. He did his PGPX from IIM-Lucknow and had nine years of global exposure in Education Consulting, IT services, and Project Management (PRINCE2). His research interests include Innovation Management, Health Economics and Gold Policy. He has published a research paper in Finance Research Letters on “Central bank gold reserves and sovereign credit risk.”

Hira Ballabh Pant
Lecturer
Hira Pant currently teaches Data Management and analysis using different tools and he is involved in various research projects and extends support for data management and analysis. His research interests include data usage for effective and inclusive health care programme design, Visual Analytics for health care, disability related research. He is an MA in Economics from Gadhwal Univeristy and a Post Graduate Diploma in Biostatistics and Data Management from IIPHH.

Vaishakh Nair
Research Assistant
Vaishakh Nair completed his Masters in Economics from Gokhale Institute of Politics & Economics. He has interned at the Reserve Bank of India and the Centre for Public Policy and Research. His academic projects have been predominantly based on DHS datasets to study infant mortality patterns and the care economy

Dr Varun Agiwal
Senior Lecturer
Dr Varun Agiwal is a Senior Lecturer at Indian Institute of Public Health, Hyderabad, India. He has completed his Master and Doctorate degrees in Statistics from the Department of Statistics, Central University of Rajasthan, Ajmer, India. He has published more than 22 research papers in national and international peer-reviewed journals. His expertise includes medical statistics, linear & non-linear time series and data modelling.

Yogita Kadam
Research Associate
Yogita has completed her Bachelors in Optometry from Aditya Jyot Institute of Optometry, Mumbai in 2009. She went on to be selected for a Comprehensive Clinical Fellowship in Optometry at the L.V. Prasad Eye Institute. She has seven years of work experience with organizations like LVPEI, Centre of Sight, Prime Eye care and The World of Optometry.

Ragukumar V
Reserach Associate
Ragukumar has completed his Bachelors in Optometry in 2019 and Masters in Public Health with a specialization in Epidemiology and Bio-Statistics from SRM University in 2021. He has done internships in Optometry with a few organizations. After completing his post graduation he was selected as an intern with ICMR-National Institute of Epidemiology.

Shubhangi Agrawal
Research Assistant
Shubhangi Agrawal is a research assistant at IIM Ahmedabad. She has worked on various projects related to innovation during her time at Center for Digital Transformation, IIMA. She graduated from Queen Mary University of London with a Masters in Economics in September, 2019. Her research interests are economics of innovation, labour economics and gender studies.

Madhura Dasgupta
Research Assistant
Madhura Dasgupta completed her Ph.D in Economics from University at Buffalo, SUNY in September 2019. Her research interests include Public Economics and Health care by using Machine Learning for Big Data Analytics. She feels that addressing health issues and concerns, by performing policy relevant rigorous empirical research, with the goal to generate improved policy interventions, is of immense value in the present circumstances.