Anitha Kurup is a Professor, School of Social Sciences and Anchor of the Education Programme. She is also leading the National Gifted Education Program in India anchored at NIAS. Her research interests span the broad disciplines of education and gender studies. Her recent publications “Trained Scientific Women Power: How much are we Losing and Why?” and “Trends Report: Creation and Analysis of Database of PhDs in India (1998-2007)” have been widely appreciated. As part of the Gifted Education research, she has developed an Indian based identification protocol to identify the gifted children in the age group 3-18 years. She has been working with her team on the standardisation of the identification protocol. Along the same lines she is developing a multi- level multi stage model for mentoring the gifted children in India. Her doctoral work on quality of primary education in rural India is one of the earliest often cited work on grounded research in class room processes and school –community relationship in rural India. Prof Anitha Kurup's expertise in the area of gender covers a wide spectrum, from examining conceptual and methodological strands of gender relations to political participation and decentralised governance. Prof. Anitha Kurup is a Member, Governing Board of ISEC, Bangalore, and Member, Academic Council, Christ University.  She has several publications to her credit. Prof Anitha Kurup was awarded the Fulbright Nehru Senior Research Fellowship for the year 2011-2012 and was hosted at the University of California, Davis.