Balaji Gopalan

Balaji Gopalan has 20 years of experience in using communication for social impact in education, livelihoods, governance, organic food, and healthcare. He has designed several behaviour change campaigns in the WASH sector, across Asia and Africa, including the SuperAmma campaign for hand washing with soap. At present, he is co-founder and director at Upward Spiral.

Upward Spiral conceptualised the idea of Behaviour Change Hub, a new way of designing behaviour change interventions across countries and contexts, that optimises resources and builds capacity of practitioners. It is being piloted in partnership with SNV in Asia and Africa. As part of the Hub, he is engaged in designing behaviour change interventions and also mentoring practitioners.

Nipa Desai

Balaji Gopalan has 20 years of experience in using communication for social impact in education, livelihoods, governance, organic food, and healthcare. He has designed several behaviour change campaigns in the WASH sector, across Asia and Africa, including the SuperAmma campaign for hand washing with soap. At present, he is co-founder and director at Upward Spiral. Upward Spiral conceptualised the idea of Behaviour Change Hub, a new way of designing behaviour change interventions across countries and contexts, that optimises resources and builds capacity of practitioners. It is being piloted in partnership with SNV in Asia and Africa. As part of the Hub, he is engaged in designing behaviour change interventions and also mentoring practitioners.

Adam Biran

Adam Biran is from Associate professor in evolutionary public health, LSHTM (Co-author of BCD framework), He is a mixed methods, social science researcher with more than two decades experience of applied work, consultancy and research in sanitation, hygiene and behaviour change in low income countries. For 22 years Adam held an academic position in the Environmental Health Group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He initiates, implement and manage projects, prepare proposals and produce high quality written outputs for a variety of audiences.

Adam has experience of collaborating with non-governmental organisations, UN agencies and the private sector. He aims is to contribute to improved health and wellbeing through research, evaluation, technical assistance and capacity strengthening. He recently supported monitoring and evaluation for behaviour change communication in Tanzania’s National Sanitaiton Program and contribute to a multi-country, capacity strengthening hub for a large non-governmental organisation.

Robert Aunger

Robert Aunger is Associate Professor in Evolutionary Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He has a Masters in Urban Planning from the University of Southern California, a PhD in biological anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and did post-doctoral work in psychology at the University of Chicago and King’s College, Cambridge. He has published books on cultural evolution, the evolution of human behaviour, and ethnographic methods. He is the lead developer of a novel approach to behaviour change called ‘Behaviour Centred Design’ which has its origins in evolutionary biology, ecological psychology and commercial marketing.

For over a decade, he has helped implement public health projects in water, sanitation, hygiene, nutrition and HIV using this approach in multiple countries on the African and Asian continents, including designing creative materials for mass media and community activation.

Teerath Rawat

Teerath Rawat is a Graphic Designer with 14 years of experience in developing visual design for print and digital media. He has worked in WASH (Water, Sanitation, Hygiene), Disability Employment and Children's Skill Development sectors. He has worked in the social sector with major clients like - Arghyam, Tata Trusts, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Headstream and TRRAIN (Trust for Retailers & Retail Associates of India).

Valerie Curtis (1958-2020)

Val, or the ‘queen of hygiene’ as she is remembered by many, introduced us to the science of behaviour change and got us curious about the unconscious and subconscious drives that shape human behaviours. She had a gift for communicating complex scientific theories in way that was simple and exciting. For over a decade, we worked with her on different projects and we learnt much; to look for universal drives beyond cultures and contexts, to find how they are relevant in people’s lives, to take the creative leaps that are surprising, to always test and see if they are work, to seize the moment, to not shy away from the spotlight, to share knowledge freely, to leave aside egos and be willing to revisit ideas based on evidence, to be ambitious in scale, above all, to do whatever it takes to create impact.