Indian Institute of Management Bangalore Archives

Rafa Sattar

Rafa Sattar graduated from Macaulay Honors College at CUNY Hunter College in 2020 as a salutatorian with a BA in political science. Rafa is currently pursuing her master’s in nonprofit management at Columbia University. There, she is one of the two winners of the Excellence in Academic Leadership Award for the 2022–2023 academic year. She is also a 2022 recipient of the Diana Award, one of the most prestigious accolades a young person can receive for their humanitarian work. Rafa is founder and president of Fera Foundation, an international nonprofit that delivers tailored educational services based on the needs of the most vulnerable children. In 2020, she launched the CARE (Countering Adversity via Remote Education) Teaching Fellowship at a girls’ orphanage where she aimed to help the children prepare for their exams and procure meaningful mentors; by adapting a dual teacher system, Rafa envisioned a future where online learning could overcome barriers to educational equity. Since then, Rafa has been managing a team of 70 remote teachers from seven countries and 100 weekly synchronous and asynchronous classes at more than 200 schools and orphanages. The online classes for grades 1–12 integrate curricula, interactive resources, and teaching techniques adapted from the U.S. education system. Rafa also serves on the board of trustees of the UK-based charity, Communities Against Gender-Based Violence International. After her Fulbright fellowship, she hopes to pursue a JD in the U.S. to defend the educational rights of women and children around the world.

In her free time, she enjoys early morning runs, watching classic Bengali films, and visiting art museums.

Rafa’s Fulbright-Nehru research is exploring how innovative social interventions in West Bengal apply localization strategies to promote educational equity. Under the supervision of Dr. Devi Vijay of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Rafa is attempting to determine how community-centered approaches to social innovation in India can apply to the Fera Foundation. She is also researching community-centered approaches to organizing and also the factors that catalyze acceptance for social change in India.

Gopal Krishnan

Prof. Gopal Krishnan is a trustee professor of accountancy and the coordinator of the PhD program in accounting at Bentley University. Before joining Bentley, he was the chair of the Accounting Department at Kogod School of Business, American University, Washington, D.C. He has also taught at Lehigh University and George Mason University. He is a chartered accountant, certified public accountant, and a certified management accountant. Professor Krishnan is cited in the Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers for his teaching excellence. His research addresses issues concerning auditor independence and audit quality, corporate governance and earnings management. He has published 80 articles in accounting and finance journals, including Accounting, Organizations and Society, Contemporary Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, Review of Accounting Studies, Journal of Banking & Finance, Journal of the American Taxation Association, Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, Accounting Horizons, Journal of Management Accounting Research, and Journal of Business Ethics. His work has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Accounting Today, CNBC.com, Reuters, CFOWorld, and CFO.com. His co-authored article on a synthesis of audit-quality literature was awarded the 2016 Best Paper Award by the Auditing Section of the American Accounting Association. He was a senior editor of Accounting Horizons and holds a PhD from the University of North Texas.

Business groups (BGs) are dominant forms of industrial organization in India. For example, BG-affiliated firms account for 67 per cent of the total Bombay Stock Exchange market capitalization. However, despite the importance of BGs in India, there is a paucity of empirical research on the quality of audits of firms affiliated with BGs. Prof. Krishnan’s Fulbright-Nehru project is conducting an empirical study of the audit quality of Indian firms which are affiliated with BGs. Specifically, the study is examining whether there is a difference in audit quality between Indian firms affiliated with BGs and those that are unaffiliated (standalone firms).

Ricca Slone

Prof. Ricca Slone has been teaching graduate public policy courses in Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies for the past 12 years. Most recently, she taught an online course on Congressional procedure in Fall 2023. Before teaching at Northwestern University, Prof. Slone worked on water-supply issues for three years at the Environmental Law & Policy Center, a research and advocacy organization based in Chicago which works in several U.S. Midwestern states. From 1997 to 2005, Prof. Slone served four terms as a state representative in the Illinois House of Representatives, representing the 92nd district in central Illinois. She also chaired the Higher Education Appropriations Committee and was the vice chair of the Energy & Environment Committee.

As a senior scholar near the end of her working years, Prof. Slone hopes to rejuvenate the Sun Oven project by relaunching the assembling and marketing of solar ovens from a new location in Karnataka so that they can help women in South India who cook over wood fires.

Prof. Slone’s Fulbright-Nehru project is identifying strategies to overcome Indian cultural challenges to adopting renewable technologies. The framework for analysis is Nordgren and Schonthal’s friction theory (The Human Element, 2022). The project’s focus is on adoption of clean solar cooking by rural Indian women who otherwise cook over smoky fires, which is time consuming and causes respiratory diseases and deforestation. The research is a case study comparing the relative ease of adoption of the following technologies: wind turbines for energy; electric tuk-tuks for mobility; and solar ovens for cooking. Prof. Slone’s hypothesis is that cooking will encounter the most cultural resistance.