Harini Kannan

Harini Kannan is a Research Scientist at J-PAL South Asia. She has about 14 years of experience designing and leading large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCTs) across diverse states in India, tackling complex challenges in sectors such as health and education. Her work has contributed critical insights into the efficacy of various development interventions, particularly in education pedagogy and in uptake of preventive healthcare. With a deep understanding of both on-ground realities and rigorous research methodologies, she has considerable experience in managing teams, engaging and advising diverse stakeholders, and ensuring the highest quality in research implementation and analysis.

Harini is a Principal Investigator on a variety of education projects focused on improving school readiness, learning outcomes and educational and career aspirations among children in schools. She has co-authored with Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, among others, on a series of large scale randomised evaluations on foundational literacy interventions in India found to be highly impactful, and at the stages of being scaled up across several Indian states and in parts of Africa, to reach over 60 million children. Her current resarch include parental engagement in early childhood education, identifying and nututring talented high-achievers in underresourced setting, using evidence from cognitive science and the “Science of Reading” to develop reading games for children and understanding aspirations for older school children regarding vocational education. She has also worked as an investigator on one on J-PAL’s largest evaluations – Improving immunization coverage through incentive, reminders and social networks in India. 

In addition to her research portfolio, Harini also serves as a techinical advisor to J-PAL’s Scale-up teams for scaling up a game-based math curriculum for early years (4-6 year olds) across several Indian states, developed by the Harvard Lab of Developmental Studies and evaluated in collaboration with J-PAL SA. 

She also works closely with the J-PAL South Asia Capacity Building team providing customized advisory services and training on Monitoring and Evaluation for various government, mutli-national and civil society partners. 

Harini has a Ph.D. in Economics from Georgia State University.