Dr. Debayan Pakrashi is an Associate Professor in the Economic Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata. Dr. Pakrashi has a PhD in Economics from the University of Queensland, and a Master of Arts in Economics (with thesis) from the University of Calgary, Canada. He is an applied microeconomist by training and is particularly interested in issues related to public policy and public health. His current research focuses on technology adoption and diffusion; maternal and child health; women's safety and empowerment, socio-economic determinants of subjective wellbeing, etc; using both primary (RCTs, household surveys, field, and audit experiments) and secondary datasets (cross-sectional as well as panel data).

For his research and development efforts, Dr. Pakrashi was selected for the STAAARS+ Fellowship of the USAID Innovation Lab (2021-2023), J-PAL South Asia's Indian Scholars Program (2021-2022) and received the Australian Alumni Excellence Award India under Young Achiever Category (2015), the Institute Fellowship (2014-2017), the PK Kelkar Class of 1979 Research Fellowship for Outstanding Young Faculty (2017-2020) from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (a renowned Chair position) and the Prof. M. J. Manohar Rao Award (2016) awarded to young scholars under the age of 35 from The Indian Econometric Society. Dr. Pakrashi’s research has been published in top Economics journals such as JDE, RESTAT, AEJ: Applied Economics, AJAE, Health Economics, JEBO, WBER, JDS, etc.