Shobhini Mukerji is the Executive Director of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)’s South Asia regional centre. She has led J-PAL’s largest office since 2011, working alongside a team of over 200 staff to guide its pan-India operations and partnerships with more than 20 state and central government agencies.
Shobhini works closely with policymakers, civil society partners and research institutions to promote the use of evidence in policymaking and support the scale-up of successful social programmes across India and the South Asia region. She also advises multilaterals and donors on effective spending on policy interventions that have the potential to bring transformational change to the lives of people living in poverty.
Her research interests include education outcomes at the intersection of gender and employment. She has co-authored large-scale randomized evaluations of foundational literacy interventions in India that have been highly impactful and are being scaled across several Indian states and parts of Africa, reaching over 60 million children.
Shobhini holds a Master’s degree in Social Research Methods from the London School of Economics, with a focus on Social Policy and Statistics. She began her career at Pratham and joined J-PAL South Asia in 2007 as a Research Associate.