Our Team

Anirudh Dinesh is a research fellow at the Burnes Center and conducts research and training on governance innovation. He is a member of the InnovateUS project, our innovation skills training for public sector employees. He is also a member of the team designing and piloting experiments for new models of public engagement, what the Burnes Center calls people-led innovation, to improve the legitimacy and effectiveness of policy making and solve urgent problems.

In addition, Anirudh is a member of the Data Labs research team looking at how governments can create the infrastructure, including the necessary skills and governance rules, to facilitate the use of administrative data for evaluating and improving public programs. With a grant from Markets for Good, he collaborated with New Philanthropy Capital in the UK to craft a series of case studies about Data Labs and explore how they can enable charities as well as government to conduct more data-driven impact evaluations.

In the past, Anirudh helped to research, write and produce ten original Smarter State case studies, focusing on how governments can use technology to leverage the skills of civil servants. He has also researched and authored reports on Open Data for Developing Economies, a project to explore the social and economic impact of opening government data.

In his job, Anirudh organizes events at the GovLab and the Burnes Center. He was part of the organizing team of the Collective Intelligence Conference (June 2017). He has coordinated multiple online classes and coaching programs for the GovLab Academy, including the ones on innovations in tech-enabled disaster management and data driven criminal justice.

Anirudh leads the Burnes Center’s civic tech efforts and assists in the design and development of all of Burnes Center’s original tools, platforms and high impact websites.

Prior to joining GovLab, Anirudh co-produced TEDxBNMIT 2015, an independently organized TEDx event in Bangalore, India.

Anirudh holds a master’s degree in Computer Engineering from New York University and an undergraduate degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the Visvesvaraya Technological University in India. While studying there, he interned at the Defence Research and Development Organization, where he implemented the autonomous indoor navigation of a quadcopter.

Anirudh is an avid blogger and his writings can be found at www.dudurudh.com.