Shobhini MUKERJI

Shobhini Mukerji is the Executive Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) South Asia regional centre, which she has led since 2011. She leads pan-India operations and partnerships with over 20 state and central government agencies. She works closely with policymakers, civil society partners, and research institutions to promote evidence use in policymaking and scale-ups of successful social programs across India and South Asia. She also advises multilaterals and donors on effective spending on policy interventions with the potential to bring transformational change for people living in poverty.

Her research interests span education and outcomes at the intersection of gender and employment. She has co-authored with Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and others on large-scale randomised evaluations of foundational literacy interventions in India—work found to be highly impactful and now being scaled across several Indian states and parts of Africa, reaching over 60 million children.

She sits on the advisory boards of Community Jameel and Indus Action, serves on the Board of Helvetas, and is a Steering Committee member of the Jameel Arts and Health Lab, a global initiative in collaboration with the World Health Organization. She has also served on expert committees for Facebook's Vaccine Hesitancy Fund and MIT Solve's Challenge for Equitable Health Systems.

She 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, gaining extensive experience in designing and managing large-scale primary data collection, research design and monitoring.