people

Dr. KG Santhya is a demographer specialising in inter-disciplinary research on a variety of
health and development issues. Her areas of focus include young people’s education,
economic participation, agency and aspirations, sexual and reproductive health and mental
health, gender equality and gender-based violence and modern-day slavery. She had two-and-
a-half decades of experience in leading rigorous quantitative and qualitative research studies
and have served as the principal investigator/ co-investigator of over 30 formative,
implementation and evaluation research studies, including large, complex national level
studies in India. She held various positions at the Population Council during 2000-2022,
rising from post-doctoral fellow to programme officer, senior programme officer to Associate
and then Senior Associate. She has served as a member of scientific panels of the
International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and the Asian Population
Association and the Executive Council of the Asian Population Association. She was the
recipient of the 2025 IUSSP- Mattei Dogan Foundation Award for Comparative Research in
Demography.