Research Lead — UDAYA Lab

Early Childhood Development | Developmental Science

Community Empowerment Lab (CEL)

Full time | Field-embedded | Mission-driven​

UDAYA: the first light. The moment of emergence.

The Lab

Somewhere in rural Uttar Pradesh, a child is learning to hold her mother’s gaze. Her brain is forming connections that will shape how she thinks, feels, and relates to the world. Most of what we know about this process comes from laboratories far from where she lives. Her context — her nutrition, the songs her mother sings, the stresses her family carries — has barely been part of the scientific story.

The UDAYA Lab exists to change that. Based within the Community Empowerment Lab (CEL), UDAYA studies how human capacities emerge in the earliest years of life — how attention, learning, self-regulation, and social understanding unfold in children growing up in diverse, real-world settings across India. It integrates four lenses: brain, behaviour, biology, and developmental ecology. The lab is already active,



with longitudinal research supported by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and multi-site studies with Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and international collaborators.

This is not a lab that measures deficits. It studies how capacities are born.

The Role

We are looking for a Research Lead to anchor the scientific work of the UDAYA Lab. This is not a role for someone who has all the answers. It is a role for someone who is learning to ask the right questions — and who wants to do so in service of children who have been largely absent from the scientific literature.

You will be mentored by senior scientists and collaborators, and given real responsibility as you grow. Your work will include:
- Contributing to the design of studies on early childhood development, from conception through the first three years of life — with increasing ownership over time.
- Working across brain, behaviour, biology, and ecology. You need not

📌 Research Lead — UDAYA Lab (Lucknow)
🏢 Community Empowerment Lab
📍 Lucknow