Dr. Leena Wadia is Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Mumbai, one of India’s premier, independent, non-partisan, public policy think tanks.

Wadia received her PhD in Physics from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore. Her thesis work and subsequent postdoctoral research at ETH Zurich was in the area of high performance computing. She has been a researcher at several places in India and abroad including NCST Mumbai (now CDAC), EPF Lausanne and CERN in Switzerland, and IIT Bombay. She also served as Senior VP and CTO at Netcore Solutions Pvt. Ltd., a start-up company in the area of mobile value-added services.

Since moving to ORF in 2010, Wadia has been engaged in research and policy advocacy in the areas of education, renewable energy, public health, and sustainable agriculture. The primary focus of her work has been on higher education in India, and she has produced several in-depth research reports advocating reforms in science education, engineering education, medical education and vocational education. She also played a key role in the preparation of the Karnataka State Education Policy in 2015.

Since August 2017 she has been supporting the Dr Kasturirangan Committee to prepare India’s draft National Education Policy, first as a member of the research team and then as a member of the drafting committee. The draft version of the policy was submitted to the government on 30 May 2019.. The policy, which is coming after a gap of over 30 years, is now being finalised on the basis of all the comments and inputs that have come in.