Arindam Nandi

Arindam Nandi is a senior associate at the Population Council with an extensive research background and expertise in health economics and early childhood development. His research at the Council focuses on adolescent education and health, including the relationship between early life conditions and schooling outcomes; long-term and intergenerational benefits of education; and the interaction between socioeconomic factors, health, schooling, and cognitive development.

His recent research has focused on the value of vaccines, including their long-term health, cognitive, and schooling benefits, and reductions in antimicrobial resistance in low- and middle-income countries. He is also involved in the world’s largest randomized trial study of the impact of a physical activity–based development program on the health and well-being of 20,000 Indian adolescents. Nandi previously jointly led the largest ever field study of the cost of delivering routine vaccination in seven Indian states. He published the first-ever longitudinal studies linking nutritional supplementation and breastfeeding in early life with reproductive health, schooling, and labor market outcomes of Indian adolescents and adults. He has also published several modeling studies of the health and economic benefits of public health interventions in India, including water and sanitation, increased educational attainment of girls, and a home-based neonatal care package. Nandi’s past research involved the political economy of gender, particularly sex-selection, in India and the United States. His work has been covered by several media outlets and cited by others. A complete history of his publications is available on his research webpage.

Before joining the Council, Nandi was a senior fellow at the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics, & Policy (now One Health Trust) in Washington, DC. He also previously served as the associate director of research at the Tata Centre for Development at the University of Chicago and as a visiting scholar at the Public Health Foundation of India.

Nandi received his PhD in economics from the University of California, Riverside.