Research Lead — UDAYA Lab

Early Childhood Development  |  Developmental Science
Community Empowerment Lab (CEL)
Full-time  |  Field-embedded  |  Mission-driven​

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UDAYA: the first light. The moment of emergence.

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The Lab

Somewhere in rural Uttar Pradesh, a child is learning to hold her mother's gaze. Her brain is forming connections that will shape how she thinks, feels, and relates to the world. Most of what we know about this process comes from laboratories far from where she lives. Her context — her nutrition, the songs her mother sings, the stresses her family carries — has barely been part of the scientific story.

The UDAYA Lab exists to change that. Based within the Community Empowerment Lab (CEL), UDAYA studies how human capacities emerge in the earliest years of life — how attention, learning, self-regulation, and social understanding unfold in children growing up in diverse, real-world settings across India. It integrates four lenses: brain, behaviour, biology, and developmental ecology. The lab is already active, with longitudinal research supported by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and multi-site studies with Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and international collaborators.

This is not a lab that measures deficits. It studies how capacities are born.

The Role

We are looking for a Research Lead to anchor the scientific work of the UDAYA Lab. This is not a role for someone who has all the answers. It is a role for someone who is learning to ask the right questions — and who wants to do so in service of children who have been largely absent from the scientific literature.

You will be mentored by senior scientists and collaborators, and given real responsibility as you grow. Your work will include:

• Contributing to the design of studies on early childhood development, from conception through the first three years of life — with increasing ownership over time.
• Working across brain, behaviour, biology, and ecology. You need not be expert in all four, but you must be genuinely curious about all of them.
• Spending significant time in the field — in homes, at community sites, in health facilities — observing, learning, and collecting data alongside field teams.
• Learning to work with advanced tools — functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), eye-tracking, low-field magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) — in settings where infrastructure is limited and resourcefulness matters.
• Helping analyse and interpret multi-modal data, and translating findings into insights that can shape care practices, interventions, and policy.
• Collaborating with CEL's research teams and external partners — ICMR, TIFR, and international institutions.
• Contributing to publications and presentations that advance the science of early development in diverse contexts.

Requirements

Who You Are

We are looking for someone whose scientific curiosity is matched by a quality of attention — to children, to context, to the questions that matter. You may come from developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, public health, paediatrics, or a related field. What matters most is the depth of your thinking and the sincerity of your orientation.

• A strong foundation in developmental science or a related discipline — through formal training and/or sustained research experience.
• Comfort with quantitative methods. Experience with neuroimaging, eye-tracking, or physiological measurement is an advantage, but the aptitude and willingness to learn matter more.
• Real curiosity across disciplines. You read outside your own field because you cannot help it.
• Comfort in field settings. You will work in villages, in homes, in under-resourced facilities. You see this not as a limitation but as the whole point.
• Humility. The mothers and families you work with know things about child development that no textbook has captured. You are ready to learn from them.
• The desire to grow. This role comes with mentorship, collaboration with national and global scientists, and space to develop your own research voice. You do not need to arrive complete. You need to arrive ready.

Why This Matters

The first thousand days of a child's life hold more possibility than any other period. Yet most of the science that informs global policy on early childhood comes from a narrow slice of the world's children. Children of rural India, of South Asia, of sub-Saharan Africa — the majority of the world's young lives and their environment — needs to illuminate and expand our understanding of how development unfolds. UDAYA exists to accomplish that.

Location

Based at CEL in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, with regular field immersion at research sites. This is a field-embedded role. The lab is where the children are.

To Apply

Please share your CV with a short note (in cover letter) — in your own voice — telling us:

• What draws you to the science of early human development?
• Describe a research question that keeps you up at night.
• What does it mean to you to study children where they actually live?

 

Write to us at workwithus@celworld.org

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Every child's first light deserves a witness. If you want to be one of them —

we would be honoured to have you join this journey.

www.celworld.org