Nandini Chatterjee Singh is a cognitive neuroscientist and currently Senior Project Office at UNESCO MGIEP (Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development, in New Delhi, India. Nandini works on learning, in the context of literacy, emotion and music.
Nandini received her PhD in physics from the University of Pune in India. Her post-doctoral research focused on auditory learning mechanisms in songbirds at University of California Berkeley. She established the first cognitive and neuroimaging laboratory in India at the National Brain Research Centre (NBRC) in India. Her research at NBRC focused on language, literacy, and music. Using behavioural and functional neuroimaging experiments, her laboratory sought to understand neurodiversity especially children with autism and dyslexia. Her work in biliteracy led to the development of DALI (Dyslexia Assessment for Languages of India), the first tool standardized tool to screen and assess dyslexia in multiple Indian languages. Her research laboratory at NBRC also conducted research on how Indian ragas elicits distinct emotions.
Since 2017, she has been at UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) where she uses neuroscience to design courses for social and emotional learning using digital pedagogies. She has led the development EMC2, a neuroscience based framework that builds SEL competencies of Empathy(E), Mindfulness (M), Compassion ( C) and Critical Inquiry (C). She is focused on designing new interactive curricula using innovative digital pedagogies like, digital games, digital dialogue to cultivate SEL and conducts cross-cultural research to assess their efficacy in school education systems.