Janaki Mohanachandran

Janaki is a trained ecologist who discovered her affinity for social sciences while working with indigenous communities in the eastern Himalayas for WWF-India. During her five years with WWF-India, she has worked closely with the communities to capture the discrepancies between well-intended conservation interventions and the realities that materialize on ground. She has dabbled briefly with the vast world of traditional ecological knowledge that exists in several traditional informal institutions. She has also explored co-designing and co-producing research and implementation, while designing conservation interventions that address the human-snow leopard conflict, triggered by large scale livestock depredation and loss in the eastern Himalayas.

Janaki will start her PhD program (Fall 2022) in Integrative conservation (ICON) and anthropology where she hopes to explore disciplines like social psychology, anthropology, and policy. Her honed interest in indigenous youth development and social well-being motivates her to explore concepts like sense of place, self-efficacy, pro-environment behavior and ecological grief experienced by indigenous youth in the backdrop of rapid global change and livelihood diversification in the eastern Himalayas.