Rachita Gulati is Research Economist at the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI), Tokyo, Japan. She is also a faculty at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee. Previously, she held the prestigious Subir Chowdhury Visiting Fellowship (2017&2018) at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has also served as a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Kashipur. She specializes in banking and financial institutions, regulation, stability, governance, digitalization, applied econometrics, and efficiency and productivity analysis. Her work involves development of nonparametric models for performance benchmarking across sectors. She has led and coordinated policy-oriented research projects in collaboration with central banks, ministries, and prominent think tanks across Asia. Her research has been published in journals like Omega, Empirical Economics, Computational Economics, Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Asia-Pacific Journal of Management, Economic Modelling, Research in International Business and Finance, and The North American Journal of Finance and Accounting.
Sunil Kumar is Professor, Faculty of Economics, South Asian University, New Delhi, India. His research specialization includes data envelopment analysis, stochastic frontier analysis, banking efficiency, and industrial productivity analysis, with a particular focus on performance evaluation of financial institutions, public sector undertakings, and educational institutions. Prof. Kumar has authored two books in 2001 and 2014 and edited two in 2024 and 2025. His collaborative research includes a comprehensive Development Research Group (DRG) study in 2022 for the Reserve Bank of India. He publishes in journals like Omega, Expert Systems with Applications, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs) Climate Change, Computational Economics, Economic Modelling, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Applied Economics Letters, Economic Change and Restructuring, Economic Systems, and the International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management. Anup Kumar Bhandari is Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. His research areas include production economics (with special reference to efficiency and productivity analysis), industrial economics, and issues related to Indian banking and its overall financial markets.
He has published in these areas in journals like Journal of Productivity Analysis, Review of Development Economics, Economic Modelling, Research in International Business and Finance, Journal of Economic Asymmetries, to name a few. V Charles is Programme Director (MSc AI in Business), Queen&s Business School, as well as Programme Director (Beyond GenAI EdX), William J Clinton Leadership Institute, at Queen&s University Belfast, UK. He is an AWS Accredited Educator and Vice Chair of the British Computer Society (BCS) Northern Ireland. He has been recognised as Fellow of the BCS and the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), Senior Member of INFORMS, Senior Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, and Senior Member of The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (UK). His research lies at the intersection of AI and Management Science, with a particular emphasis on boosting business productivity, fostering regional competitiveness, enhancing societal welfare, and informing policy, all underpinned by a strong commitment to delivering positive, multidimensional impact. He publishes his research in top-tier journals and holds various editorial positions as a special issue editor and Associate Editor. He is a Six Sigma Black Belt and holds EdX certificates from MIT, Harvard, IE Business School, and the RSS.