Biography
Samir K. Doshi is a postdoctoral research at the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Industrial Sustainability. His work connects the fields of development economics, systems ecology, engineering, design and governance to transition degraded and impoverished communities to more sustainable and resilient societies. Samir is a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and a former Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar in India. His doctoral research on restoration ecology and industrial sustainability with impoverished coal mining communities in the US contributed to the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Design Award and started two social enterprises. He is a former fellow of the Santa Fe Institute, National Audubon TogetherGreen, Environmental Leadership Program and was an advisor to the UN Rio+20 Sustainable Development Conference's Future We Want campaign. Samir’s work has appeared in the New York Times, BBC, Washington Post, and several other media outlets. Samir is also a Visiting Fellow at Schumacher College, where he is helping to develop a new M.A. in Ecological Design Thinking from a holistic science approach. His work on community resilience and sustainable development won the Ecological Society of America / Union of Concerned Scientists EcoService award.
Samir’s current research focuses on improving the efficiency and efficacy of development innovations in India. Working across stakeholder groups of investors, government, academic researchers, social enterprises and community members, Samir is building capacity on how indigenous initiatives in India can 1) build tools to improve monitoring and evaluation to assess impact of development interventions using mobile and other information and communications technology for development applications (ICT4D), 2) pilot mixed-method interdisciplinary assessment approaches that include immersion, randomized control trials (RCTs) and other methods, and 3) improving communication across the stakeholder groups to improve evidence based decision making.