Inventing the Future: India’s Climate Innovation Pathways

An engineer by training, Karthik Ganesan is a Fellow and Director, Research Coordination, at The Council. As Director, he has a bird's eye view of CEEW's ongoing and planned research and ensures cross-team coherence for CEEW's research direction and imperatives. He also dons the hat of an internal adviser across research teams, creates institutional platforms that spur innovation and, in partnership with other senior researchers, continues to strengthen CEEW's foundation for world-class research. He has played a pivotal role in conceptualising and executing some of CEEW's biggest successes and collaborative efforts such as the ACCESS and IRES surveys and the associated studies, the GHG Platform Initiative and the first full fledged office programme office based out of Lucknow. He continues to be an active researcher with the power sector and air pollution work programmes. Karthik holds a Master's degree in Public Policy from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He also holds an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering and an M.Tech in Infrastructure Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. 

Paula Mariwala is a well-known venture capitalist, who has been part of building the startup ecosystem in India since 2006. One of the first women VC in India, she is the founding partner at Aureolis Ventures, Aureolis an early-stage venture capital firm investing in deep-tech, climate and health in India, the USA, and the UK. She is also the Founder/President of Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs India and Director of the Hinditron Group.As an engaged philanthropist, she is deeply committed to the causes of education, environment, gender equality, human rights and the arts. Paula is a founding member of the Board of Management of Krea University and sits on management and advisory boards of companies and foundations.Paula holds an MS in Applied Physics from Stanford University and BSc (Hons) in Physics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. She lives in Mumbai with her family and enjoys painting, writing poetry, trekking, birding, supporting the arts and engaging with various social issues

Raghav is Director, Portfolio at India Health Fund (A Tata Trusts Initiative), leading catalytic investments into innovative healthcare startups for impact within public health. He leads a team of public health professionals that identify critical need gaps within infectious diseases (TB, Malaria (and other vector borne diseases), Anti-microbial resistance, Climate X Health and Maternal Health) and find, fund and enable ecosystem support for promising science and technology through their lab-to-market journey. He is a mechanical engineer by education and has experience of over 17 years across management consulting, public health impact investment, deep-science healthcare startups and social enterprise strategy. He has previously worked in business consulting across sectors, followed by stints with deep science healthcare startups where he led market entry strategy in critical care, cancer diagnostics and acoustic cardiography in India, working on technology development, user research and business model design.

Shankar Ghosh, Professor of Experimental Physics at TIFR, Mumbai, investigates how ordinary materials self-organize into functional systems. His distinctive tabletop approach uses simple experiments with everyday objects like grains, toothpicks, and beads to capture fundamental physics. He focuses on materials driven out of equilibrium, where factors such as friction, shape, and collective motion lead to the emergence of order. Crucially, his work harnesses friction, noise, and disorder as active ingredients, showing how these emergent organized states can be engineered to perform functions such as supporting loads or directing motion. A central insight of his research is that feedback between friction, geometry, and motion allows systems to self-tune into robust states, even in noisy environments. His work also informs the design of air-filtration media and clarifies how frictional wear at tire-road contacts contributes to urban particulate pollution. He received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 2019.