Dr. Vinish Kumar Kathuria, an alumnus of NIT Kurukshetra has joined as Director of Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Jaipur on Sep. 26, 2023. He is on lien from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, where he was Shailesh J. Mehta Chair Professor at SJMSOM of IIT Bombay. He is in the teaching and research profession since 1998 after his PhD in Economics from IGIDR, an RBI funded institute. At IIT Bombay, he was Professor-in-charge (PIC) of Bank of Baroda Innovation Centre (BoBIC) from Nov. 2019 to Sep. 2023.

His teaching and research activities relate to economics mainly in the fields of Macroeconomics, Industrial, Environment and Energy Economics. Before joining IIT Bombay, he was on Fulbright Senior Researcher fellowship to University of Colorado, Boulder (USA). He has over 120 publications, several of which are in international journals including Research Policy, Applied Economics, Energy Policy, Journal of Development Studies, Journal of Comparative Economics, World Development, Oxford Economic Papers, Ecological Economics, Land Use Policy, Journal of International Development, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, among others.

He has pursued his post-doc from University of Gothenburg, Sweden in the area of Environmental Economics and Ph.D. internship from UNU/INTECH, Maastricht, The Netherlands. His thesis was short-listed by UNESCO for its Management of Social Transformation (MOST) award in the year 2000-01. In 2012 he was awarded Mahalanobis Memorial Medal (National) Award 2010 in the area of Quantitative Economics by The Indian Econometric Society (TIES). In a recent paper in 2016, he was ranked as the top researcher in economics among all business school researchers of the country and featured in the top 5% researchers of the business schools across India (“http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S03050483%2016000359”). In December 2015 he was given Distinguished Alumnus award in the field of Education by NIT Kurukshetra Alumni Association. He served as Member of Standing Committee on Economics Statistics, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), GoI from Dec. 2019 to Nov. 2022.