Meet Our Team
Principal Investigator
Dr. Joseph Levitan
Joseph Levitan, PhD, is an Associate Professor, William Dawson Scholar and the Associate Dean at the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. His work focuses on participatory methodologies to address community-defined challenges in education and development. Positioned at the intersection of policy and leadership studies, his work focuses on developing processes and evaluating impacts of collaborative work with youth, adults, and community leaders. Dr. Levitan has won multiple awards for his research and teaching, including the A. Noam Chomsky Global Connections Award from the Society of Transnational Academic Researchers; the Heather Reisman and Gerald Schwartz Award for Excellence in Teaching from the McGill Faculty of Education; and a Doctor Honoris Causa (Honorary Doctorate) from the national postdoctoral research society of Peru. He has co-developed methods such as the Student Voice Research Framework and Culturally Grounded Curriculum Development. He is currently a William Dawson Scholar and currently holds multiple grants to engage in this work in India, Peru, Panama, Canada and the United States.
Email: joseph.levitan@mcgill.ca
Collaborator
Mekin Maheshwari
Mekin is the founder & CEO of Udhyam Learning Foundation, a non-profit driving the entrepreneurial mindsets curriculum for over 16 lakh government school students across 8 states in India. Udhyam's work is guided by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of Quality Education, Decent Work and Economic Growth and Partnerships for Goals. He is also a co-founder of Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship and Social Change at ACT Grants laying strong foundations to his vision of making India more entrepreneurial and work-ready. As an angel investor & philanthropist, he is focused on creating impact at scale in the fields of education and technology. An engineer by education, Mekin started his career at Yahoo! and became an early leader at Flipkart, building & leading the most impactful technology team in the country to eventually playing the role of Chief People Officer. He deeply cares about people realizing their potential and succeeding in life. His success is owed, in part, to his compassion for people and his commitment to see them achieve their full potential and claim the life they want.
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Email: mekin@udhyam.org
Researcher
Kunal Mishra
Kunal is a research scholar at the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. His research interests lie in exploring student agency through school curriculum. Positioned at the intersection of academia and developmental practice, his work adopts participatory frameworks and longitudinal research designs to understand long term impact of entrepreneurship education on students’ lives after school. He collaborates with stakeholders across strategic, design and pedagogical portfolios to curate meaningful data-based stories from his research. Kunal has been awarded an International Development Research Centre grant for his work on youth agency in India. Kunal also brings his valuable practitioner experiences in the education landscape in India, having designed curriculum and capacity building courses for large-scale NGOs like the Krishnamurti Foundation India, Labhya Foundation and the Dalai Lama Trust. He has led training and content development teams for key social and emotional learning (SEL) organisations in India. Through his work with young people, he aims to create and amplify more holistic and enabling spaces in which youth can thrive.
Email: kunal.mishra@mail.mcgill.ca
Researcher
Syeda Asia
Syeda Asia is a researcher and a design practitioner in the field of education, gender and grassroots innovation in India. As a Principal Specialist at Udhyam Learning Foundation, she has designed the student-led entrepreneurial action programme for Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs). Asia was previously a research scholar at the Delhi School of Economics and is a co-founder at AeSha, a multi-disciplinary grassroots lab that co-designs innovations with communities for professionalization of work in low-income settlements. Asia has worked with the Rishi Valley Institute for Educational Resources (RiVER), Krishnamurti Foundation India for their Teacher Enrichment Programme and has received several prestigious international awards and grants for participatory research and design initiatives. She has been a Global Emerging Scholar awardee twice and her work has been recognised at the European Group of Organisational Studies, Germany; the European Council of South Asian Studies, Paris; and the Design Principles & Practices Forum, Common Ground Research Network, United States.
Email: syeda@udhyam.org