Department of
Humanities and Social Sciences

Shalini Sharma is Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IISER Pune where she also heads the Science Media Centre. She has a PhD in Development Studies from SOAS, University of London as a Felix Fellow. Her work focuses on cities, culture, and environment relations.

Dr. Sharma is interested in learning what knowledges are crucial for sustainable communities, and how these knowledges can be applied for building resilience and adaptive capacities of people/public policy? Her work on environmental/disaster sociology also engages with applied humanities.  She is oral historian and founding member of the Remember Bhopal Museum (India's first oral history-based museum which is also co-curated by communities affected by the 1984 industrial disaster and ongoing groundwater contamination in Bhopal). She is also a member of the Living Waters Museum and the Centre for Water Research at IISER Pune. She has contributed to IPCC AR6, WG-II on cities and settlements. This drew on her work as Assistant Professor at TISS Guwahati in Northeast India and her postdoctoral research during 2018-2020 as Commonwealth and Fulbright Fellow at University of East Anglia and Princeton respectively.  

During 2020-21, she led a GCRF QR funded UEA-IISER Pune research project producing over 60 original oral histories on how environment and social justice activists are interpreting and responding to climate action in India.  Most recently, she was selected by UNESCO Climate Change Education Office in Paris for training on national curriculum and strategic planning towards climate education goals. However, she enjoyes teaching the most. In 2022, she received IISER Pune’s Excellence in Teaching Award.