CSSL's team of resident and non-resident experts are drawn from premier institutions such as the IITs, IIMs and leading universities such as the Harvard and Oxford. Members have experience of building large scale diagnostic assessment tools in multiple languages, executing data collection and analysing more than 15 million students' data across South Asia. Having researched on student cognitive and affective learning through  impact evaluation, randomised control trials, cross sectional and longitudinal studies in government and private schools,  the team brings expertise in assessment theories , international standards and best practises in assessments.

Vyjayanthi Sankar

Gauri Sharma

Sailaja Ravikanth

Bharti Achal Maloo

Vyjayanthi is the founder and executive director for Centre for Science of Student Learning. A Fulbright Humphrey fellow and an Ashoka fellow, Vyjayanthi regularly consults at the global level for the Brookings Institution, The World Bank and UNICEF and the Learning Metric Task Force. 
Vyjayanthi specializes in psychometrics, modern Item Response Theory, diagnostic assessments in multiple languages, curriculum and research. As  founder and Vice President of Educational Initiatives Large Scale Assessment Division (2003-13), Vyjayanthi pioneered Large Scale Learning Achievement studies in South Asia with nearly 90 research and assessment projects covering 15 million students and teachers. The most recent and prominent ones are the 18 state ‘Student Learning Study’ done with support of Google, the ‘Annual Status of Student Learning’ in Bhutan done under the aegis of the King of Bhutan and the ‘Quality Education study’ in partnership with Wipro in India’s ‘top’ schools. Vyjayanthi co-authored the ‘National Strategy Paper for Educational Assessments’ by TSG, Ministry of Human Resource Development, India in 2012 and regularly presents in prestigious international forums like the NCME and ILTE. She is a member of GoIs SSA Joint Review Missions and served on the advisory board of the Educational Survey Division of NCERT, India.

Gauri is AVP-Projects at CSSL. Gauri has more than a decade of project management experience in managing multi-stakeholder educational programs and large scale assessments across India in Government and Private schools.
At CSSL, Gauri  ensures that its mega projects with governments and partner groups are well managed and executed with utmost efficiency. With a Masters in Human Development from SNDT University, Mumbai, Gauri started her career in educational research by designing curriculum and textbooks for primary school children. Gauri’s expertise in rolling out large scale assessment research projects across 18 states of India includes relationship management with Governments and Private Schools, human resource management, standardized test administration, logistics, supply chain, vendor and data management. During her career, Gauri has handled projects for clients such as Google and Wipro. Prior to CSSL, Gauri coordinated textbook development for ICICI Foundation at State Institute of Education Research and Training, Rajasthan in its School and Teacher Education Reform Programme.

Sailaja is AVP-Test Development at CSSL. An M.Phil in History from Central University, Hyderabad. Sailaja’s journey in education has been as a teacher, a school Principal, an education researcher and an assessment expert.  
Sailaja brings with her, more than a decade of experience in test development  and assessments. Before joining CSSL, Sailaja was working with an education consultancy, where she managed their course curriculum and classroom assessments’ product for Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation in Private schools in India. Sailaja was a core member of the Large Scale Assessment team at Educational Initiatives for almost 8 years where she handled test development; translation, adaptation and validation in multiple languages; training governments and NGO partners for test development, test administration, data analysis and data use for all projects.  Sailaja has also developed the first regional language videos available till date in India that utilises the data from large scale assessments to explore student misconceptions in classrooms.

Bharti is a Lead Educational Specialist at CSSL. She specializes in Assessment research with an emphasis in Mathematics and Science. Bharti holds a Masters in Chemistry from IIT Delhi and a Bachelors from Sri Venkateshwara College, Delhi University. 
Bharti brings with her an experience of working as an education specialist and project manager for 5 years in psychometric testing and large scale assessments. Her in-depth understanding of assessment frameworks and test development enables her to create assessments that differentiates between mechanical, conceptual and higher order learning. Bharti also brings expertise in  managing projects and training for test implementation and data use. Recently, Bharti also worked on a research project by the Brookings Institution, USA doing secondary research on the status and capabilities of national and sub national governments across South Asian countries with a view to establish political, institutional, technical, and financial landscape for a regional learning assessment.