Nandini Chatterjee Singh

My work combines innovative thinking with scientific evidence to develop, design and implement original solutions to problems in learning and education. I trained as a physicist before moving into neuroscience, and that route still shapes how I work: quantitatively, with an interest in mechanism, and with a bias towards evidence that replicates. Over the past two decades I have helped build the field of cognitive and educational neuroscience in India — first as a tenured professor at the National Brain Research Centre, then at UNESCO MGIEP, and now at Ashoka University.

The through-line is translation from the laboratory to the real world. That has meant working alongside civil society organisations, social institutions, policy makers and government bodies, because findings about reading pathways, auditory processing or emotional response are only useful once they reach the people who need them — teachers identifying a struggling reader, clinicians working with autistic children, ministries designing curricula. In practice it has produced screening tools in Indian languages, teacher training at national scale, and frameworks that education systems can actually adopt.

I try to lead with compassion, and I value empathy, thinking that departs from the obvious, evidence that others can replicate, inclusion, and attention to detail.

Most of what we know about learning to read comes from monolingual English readers. India, with its alphasyllabic scripts and routinely multilingual children, is not a special case to be accommodated — it is a test of whether those accounts generalise at all.

• 20+Years building cognitive and educational neuroscience in India
• 100,000+Teachers reached through training programmes
• 200,000+Learners reached across 15+ countries
• DALIFirst multilingual dyslexia assessment for Indian languages

• Reading & biliteracy

  How the brain reads two writing systems at once, and how the transparency of a script reshapes the reading network.

• Dyslexia & assessment

  DALI — screening and assessment tools in Indian languages, built for teachers rather than specialists.

• Autism & communication

  Spoken versus sung speech in autistic children, and an early intervention that improved social communication.

• Music & emotion

  Empirical evidence for the emotions elicited by Hindustani ragas, and the tonic intervals that predict them.

• Social & emotional learning

  EMC², KISME and Libre — frameworks for building empathy, mindfulness, compassion and critical inquiry into schooling.

• Evidence for policy

  Reports and guidelines for UNESCO and national ministries, grounded in what the research actually supports.

Research in detail

• 2025 –

  Professor and Head, Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science Ashoka University, Sonipat, India

• 2024 –

  Honorary Professor Institute of Education and Human Development, University College London, UK

• 2016 –

  Affiliated Research Scientist Haskins Laboratories, Yale University, USA

See the full CV →

• Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India (2018)
• Reliance–NASI Platinum Jubilee Prize for application-oriented innovations (2018)
• Millennium Alliance Innovation Award, FICCI (2017)
• National Young Woman Scientist Award, Department of Biotechnology, Government of India (2013)