Professor Gita Sen is professor at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, India, and has been a visiting professor at the Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard University and a Fellow of the Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum, India.

She combines a distinguished academic career with policy advocacy and NGO activism. She is a pioneer in the field gender and development.

Her academic and policy activism in this field has been an inspiration to a whole generation of researchers, policy-makers of South and North, and non-governmental activists. Her recent work includes reserach and policy advocacy on the gender implications of globalisation and economic liberalisation, the gender dimensions of population policies, and the links beteen population and the environment.

She is the author, co-author or co-editor of several books on these gender-related issues. She is a founding member of DAWN (Development Alternatives with Woman for a New Era); a network of Third World researchers, activists and policy-makers committed to alternative development and gender justice.

She is a trustee of Health Watch (Indi) and of the Institute of Social Studies Trust (India). She is on the Board of the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) and on several other international organisations and advisory groups. Among many honours she received the Volvo Environment Prize in 1994, and an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia in the UK in 1998.