SEED and IIT Kharagpur Sign a Memorandum of Understanding

SEED and IIT Kharagpur Sign a Memorandum of Understanding

Professor Priyadarshi Patnaik, Director of the Rekhi Centre of Excellence for the Science of Happiness (RESH) at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and the Director of SEED, Professor Bruce Frayne, signed a five-year Memorandum of Understanding, laying the foundation for productive student and faculty exchanges and research partnerships.

Pictured above: Professor Priyadarshi Patnaik (right centre), Professor Bruce Frayne (left centre), Professor Prateep Nayak (back row left centre) and from the right Professor Rajlakshmi Guha, Professor Sangeeta Bhattacharjee, Professor Susmita Mukhopadhyay, Professor Vijai Nath Giri, Professor Saamdu Chetri, Professor Anuradha Choudhry, Professor Jenia Mukherjee and ProfessorManas Kumar Mandal – all faculty of the Rekhi Centre of Excellence for the Science of Happiness team.

Building on several years of ongoing collaboration initiated by Professor Prateep Nayak, Bruce and Prateep visited IIT Kharagpur to formalize this relationship through an MOU. A key element of this partnership is the joint Field School on Environmental Change and Governance, focused on the Coastal Commons, resilience and wellbeing. The third field school will be held this year from 3-10 August, and will focus on disaster risk in the wake of super-cyclone Fani, which made landfall at Chilika Lagoon, the site of the field school itself. Some 40 students and early career scholars from around the world will participate in this year’s field school, 10 of whom are from Waterloo and 12 are from IIT Kharagpur. The field school provides a rich learning environment focused on interactions with local communities through structured field work, supplemented with panel sessions by internationally recognised academics, development practitioners, researchers and civil society members (including local community leaders). In addition to SEED and IIT Kharagpur, the field school is organized and supported by the sustainable development focused NGO, NIRMAN Odisha.