NK
Nishanth K

Nishanth Kumar (நிஷாந்த் குமார்)

Data Scientist & Computational Social Science · PhD

I am a mathematician and data scientist working predominantly in the field of Computational Social Science with a PhD from Imperial College London and close to a decade of experience across academia, public policy, and applied research. My doctoral research studies how micro-level interactions in social and economic systems lead to macro outcomes, with a specific focus on production networks. My research focus is building simulation models to understand how to design policy better.

Previously a Researcher at the Alan Turing Institute, and before that I led research and analytics programmes at Dvara Research, contributing to parliamentary and regulatory committees in India on data protection, social protection, and financial markets.

Updates
New paper in npj Clean Air on urbanisation & air pollution in India · read →• New paper in Royal Society Open Science on tracing inequitable emissions in global supply chains · read →• Successfully defended my PhD thesis, yay! · read →• Interview with Prof. Samir Okasha with the Madras Complexity Collective on the philosophy of evolutionary biology · listen →• New paper in npj Clean Air on urbanisation & air pollution in India · read →• New paper in Royal Society Open Science on tracing inequitable emissions in global supply chains · read →• Successfully defended my PhD thesis, yay! · read →• Interview with Prof. Samir Okasha with the Madras Complexity Collective on the philosophy of evolutionary biology · listen →•

Research

I hold a PhD from the Networks and Complexity Group at Imperial College London, with close to a decade of experience working at the intersection of complexity science, finance, and public policy. My research employs network science, statistical physics, dynamical systems, and agent-based modelling to investigate global production and trade networks. I have published in peer-reviewed journals including Royal Society Open Science, npj Clean Air, Springer Knowledge and Information Systems, and Economic and Political Weekly.

Previously, I was a Researcher with the Public Policy Programme at the Alan Turing Institute, where I developed an agent-based simulation framework for global production networks and built calibration workflows to match models to empirical data.

Policy & Applied Work

Before my PhD I spent close to a decade in applied policy research at Dvara Research (formerly IFMR Finance Foundation), where I founded and led the Social Protection Initiative where we built the evidence base on last-mile exclusion in India's government-to-citizen benefits and payments. My work spanned financial inclusion, household finance, and welfare delivery: from the State of Exclusion study of cash-transfer delivery to impact evaluations of national programmes such as the Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana and the NPS-Swavalamban pension scheme.

I have advised and made submissions to regulators and government bodies — including the Reserve Bank of India, SEBI (the Working Group on the Social Stock Exchange), MeitY (on data-protection enforcement and national digital infrastructure), and the Ministry of Finance — and I was part of the team that won the World Bank Group's Mission Billion Challenge with Gram Vaani for reducing exclusions in digital-ID-based welfare. I also write for the national press, including The Hindu, India Development Review, and BusinessLine.

Building & Community

At Dvara I built the Dvara Open Online Repository for household finance, establishing research partnerships with IIT Madras, the Indian School of Business, IIM Ahmedabad, and the Stanford Centre on Global Poverty and Development, among others. I also co-founded the Madras Complexity Collective, a science-communication platform exploring complexity and emergence across language, transport, urban planning, ecology, and cognition.