Dr. Leena Chandran Wadia

She received her Ph.D. in Physics from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore. Her thesis as well as her postdoctoral work at ETH Zurich involved high-performance computing. Since then, she has been a researcher at several places in India and abroad including the National Centre for Software Technology (NCST, now CDAC), TIFR, and IIT Bombay, all in Mumbai, CERN and EPFL in Switzerland, and the Observer Research Foundation, Mumbai, where she was engaged in research and policy advocacy in the areas of education, public health, renewable energy, and agriculture. Besides her scientific publications, she has brought out several reports and publications in these areas. She also served in the corporate sector, as Senior VP and CTO, of a start-up company in the Telecom sector (Netcore Solutions, now Netcore Cloud).

Leena had the privilege of being a member of the technical secretariat to the Dr. Kasturirangan committee on the National Education Policy (NEP), and a member of the drafting committee of India’s Draft NEP 2019. Her present focus is in the area of vocational education and its implementation in the spirit of NEP 2020. She co-authored a recent report on vocational education for UNESCO in 2020, in their ‘State of the Education Report for India’ series. She has also contributed to the preparation of the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) for school education, in the area of vocational education.