Pawandeep Kaur
Doctoral StudentChair of Development Economics / CeMIS, Prof. Dr. Sebastian Vollmer
Pawandeep is a doctoral student at the Chair of Development Economics and a recipient of the CeMIS PhD Fellowship, which supports scholars from marginalized communities committed to social change. Her research lies within Development Economics at the intersection of education and gender. Her current work examines the gendered dynamics of migration and marriage markets, as well as the intersections of climate change and agricultural practices such as stubble burning in Punjab.
She holds an M.A. in Economics from Panjab University, Chandigarh. Before joining CeMIS, she worked as a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and as an Academic Associate at the Indian Institute of Management, Indore, where she supported teaching in research methodology and contributed to projects on Caste-based disparities in learning outcomes and the Right to Education Act. She has also been affiliated with research initiatives at IIT Kanpur, BHU Varanasi and Panjab University, where she worked on topics ranging from women’s safety, decision-making and financial literacy to the institutions and clusters in the handloom weaving industry.
In her prior work, she has critically engaged with questions of access and exclusion in schooling systems. She identifies as a Sikh woman from Punjab, a group underrepresented in academia. Alongside her academic pursuits, she is invested in pedagogy and mentorship, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Outside academia, she enjoys expressing herself through photography, maintains a journal for reflective writing, and nurtures a habit of wide reading.