Shobhini Mukerji

Shobhini Mukerji is the Executive Director of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)’s South Asia regional center. 

As the CEO of J-PAL’s largest office since 2011, Shobhini works alongside 200 full-time staff to guide their pan-India operations and partnerships with over 20 state and central government agencies. Shobhini works closely with policymakers, civil society partners, and research institutions to promote collaborations to increase the use of evidence in policymaking and scale-ups of successful social programs in India and the SA region. As a passionate advocate for the use of evidence and data in decision-making, Shobhini advises multilaterals and donors on effective spending on policy interventions that have the potential to bring transformational change in the lives of people living in poverty. 

Shobhini’s research interests include education and outcomes at the intersection of gender and employment. 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. 

Shobhini sits on the advisory boards of Community Jameel (an independent, global organisation, that advances science and learning for communities to thrive) and Indus Action (an India-based organisation that seeks to ease welfare access to vulnerable citizens by bridging the gap between law, policy and action). She is currently serving on the Board of Helvetas (a Swiss association committed to improving the living conditions of disadvantaged people in Africa, Asia and Latin America), and is a Steering Committee member of the Jameel Arts and Health Lab, a global initiative in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), leveraging scientific evidence to drive the integration of the arts into mainstream healthcare. Shobhini has participated in various expert committees for the review of research and funding proposals, including Facebook’s Vaccine Hesitancy Fund, and MIT Solve’s Challenge for Equitable Healthcare Systems in the past. 

With a Master’s degree in Social Research Methods from the London School of Economics, with a focus on Social Policy and Statistics, Shobhini has extensive research and evaluation experience, ranging from designing and managing large scale primary data collection and analysis, to providing advice to organizations and governments on research design, monitoring, and evaluation strategies. Shobhini began her career working at Pratham between 2002 – 2006, one of the largest NGO’s of India, working towards universal quality primary education to ensure every child is in school and has mastered basic literacy and numeracy. Shobhini has been with J-PAL South Asia since 2007 and joined as a Research Associate working under the guidance of Esther Duflo (MIT) , Rema Hanna (Harvard University) and Michael Greenstone (University of Chicago).

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