Chandra Vadhana

Dr. Chandra Vadhana R. is a Fulbright Awardee, a Visiting Postdoc Fellow, and an accomplished social entrepreneur from India. She is working at the Gendered Innovations Lab, under the guidance of Prof. Londa Schiebinger at History Department from Jan 2022 – Jan 2024. She is currently researching the development and validation of an assessment tool for measuring social equity and environmental sustainability of Startups and Startup Ecosystems.

She is also one of the 30 Landecker Fellows for 2022-2023 and is the first Indian National to win the same. 

She has completed her MBA from the School of Management Studies, CUSAT (2004) and MSc (Applied Psychology) from the University of Madras (2009).  She completed her PhD in Management from SMS, CUSAT which involved the standardization of a Psychometric tool for the assessment of managerial soft skills. Apart from being a Scholar, she is an accomplished woman entrepreneur who runs a non-profit organization, Prayaana Labs (www.prayaana.org) aiming at employability, and entrepreneurship development of girls and women. She also runs a women’s magazine named as SheSight (www.shesightmag.com) and an eCommerce platform (www.pracol.com) that sells women-made products. 

She is the first Indian woman to win special recognition for social entrepreneurship by UNCTAD Empretec Women in Business Awards, 2018. She is also a recipient of the International Visitors Leadership Program (IVLP), a fully-funded leadership program by the US State Department (2019). She serves on the Advisory board for various Government bodies / Startups in India and engages as a consultant for UNCTAD for projects involving women in business. She is also a poet and has published two poetry books, The Girl in me (2019) and The woman in me (2021). She has also directed a short film titled "The Identity" which tells the story of a woman's barriers in identity creation. 

Listen to her story on Center for South Asia's  SASSPOD.