Jahnavi Phalkey

Founding Director

Science Gallery Bengaluru

Speaker Biography

Jahnavi Phalkey is a historian of science and filmmaker, and founding director, Science Gallery Bengaluru.

Jahnavi Phalkey was appointed Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru in November 2018. Previously, Jahnavi held a tenured faculty position at King’s College London. She started her academic career at the University of Heidelberg, following which she was based at Georgia Tech-Lorraine, France, and Imperial College London. Jahnavi was Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin). She was also external curator to the Science Museum London, and has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Deutsches Museum, Munich.

Jahnavi is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India and has co-edited Science of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century. She is the producer-director of the documentary film Cyclotron.

Jahnavi read civics and politics at the University of Bombay and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. She holds a doctoral degree in history of science and technology from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta.

In 2023, Jahnavi was awarded the Infosys Prize in Humanities for her brilliant insights into the individual, institutional, and material histories of scientific research in modern India.

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