Dr. Saamdu Chetri was born in a cowshed in Dagana district of Bhutan on 15 October 1957. He is married with four children. He holds a PhD in Commerce, a Master’s in Commerce and a Post-Graduation Certificate in HRM. He has served private sector and was the first graduate to do so. During his six-year tenure in the private sector, he worked closely with many renowned firms in India such as TATA, Tractors India Ltd., Durgapur Steel Plant, MacLean & Magor, Price Waterhouse and others. He also carries 18 years of experiences in the socio-economic development sector, where he worked as the Bhutanese Head for bilateral development agencies at Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and Helvetas. During this period, he was a member of several development programs in and outside Bhutan. He has drafted over 60 reports, 3 annual programs, and has carried out many consulting assignments for organizations like UNDP, UNCDF, and Helvetas. His experiences and expertise range from rural development, micro finance, teaching, research, management of projects and administration.

After a short retirement break in 2005-06, he formed the Bhutan People’s United Party (a political party), with a few like-minded people which later took the shape of Druk Phuensum Tshogpa (DPT), the first Ruling Party. Dr Chetri was not only actively involved in designing party machinery but was also instrumental in registering the party and selecting candidates. Later, he worked as the Campaigning Manager of the Party. After the Party formed the government, the Prime Minister of Bhutan appointed him to his office as the Head of Good Governance where he was instrumental in instituting the G2C system in the country. In 2012, he was given the heroic task to develop, build and institute a Centre in Central Bhutan, Bumthang, for Gross National Happiness.

Dr. Chetri has several publications to his credit and many interviews on radio, TV and magazines around the world. He has travelled to several countries in Asia, Europe, US, Australia, and Africa sharing the seeds of Gross National Happiness, the development paradigm of Bhutan since 1970s.

Dr. RK Kulkarni is a Serial Entrepreneur and has been instrumental in the field of advancement of Informational Technology and Computer Sciences in India. He formed his first company in 1996 called The Synergy Infotech. The company provided services to multinational companies in the area of Networking, Compilers, Operating Systems and Web Technologies. He went on to form another company called Parallocity, which was a US based start-up that built a data race detector.  The product was successfully installed in companies such as Cisco. In 2013, he became the Head- India Development Center for Vector Software USA. Vecor Software is involved in automatic software testing solutions. In 2018, Vector Software was acquired by Vector Informatique and he is currently the module in-charge for the same group. He finished his Ph.D from IISc., Bangalore in Computer Science and Automation where his thesis focused on Automatic Generation of Compiler Backend. He currently lives in Bangalore and his wife is currently pursuing her Ph.D in Computer Science at University of Pennsylvania and they have two lovely daughters.

Sanjay Pandey is an industry leader in the field of Retail. Over the years, he has worn almost all hats in the retail Industry. He has a proven expertise managing functional teams driving organisational value and performance. In his previous roles, he headed Clarks Footwear, India and spearheaded Buying and Merchandising for The Future Group. He is a graduate of Bangalore University where he studied Textile Engineering and holds an MBA from Annamalai University. He enjoys traveling and currently lives in Delhi with his wife, Kavita.

Ramya Neelamegham did her undergraduate studies in Economics (Hons) at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University followed by an MBA at IIM, Ahmedabad, India. She worked as an Account Executive at J. Walter Thompson handling accounts of MNCs such as Nestle (Maggie Noodles) and Pepsi.

After this stint in industry, she did her Ph.D. at Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Chicago, IL, USA. Dr. Neelamegham’s doctoral work focussed on econometric modeling of consumer behavior for experiential products such as movies and music. Her thesis won the Howard Sheth Dissertation Award (Honorable Mention) and was published in the Journal of Marketing Research. Her research in applying statistical and econometric modeling to solve a variety of marketing problems has been published in top international journals such as Marketing Science, Marketing Letters, Journal of Marketing Research and Quantitative Marketing and Economics.

Dr. Neelamegham held academic positions at INSEAD, Fontainebleau, Paris, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Colorado, Boulder conducting leading-edge research and teaching at the undergraduate, MBA and Ph.D. levels. In 2006, she took a break to pursue her spiritual interests and moved to a monastery (Hindu Temple) for several years, learning traditional methods of worship, meditation and offering service to the community.

For the past eight years, she has been offering courses at IIM, Bangalore on International Marketing and guest lectures on Spirituality and Management both to MBA students and executives. She has published two papers in this area and authored three books. These are as follows. The first is a Hindi verse translation of a Sanskrit scripture on Divine Mother (Durga Saptashati, Saral Hindi Kavita) and the other two are spiritual fiction novels entitled My Life, Your Temple, and Magic of Surrender.

Ishani Roy is the founder of Serein Inc, a company that works with startups to implement practical diversity programs. A scientist by training, Ishani has a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Brown University and has been a post-doctoral fellow at University of Oxford and Kings College London. During the course of her work, she became aware of the challenges of building an open and collaborative workforce. Serein is an attempt at making that journey easier.