Dr Richa Patanjali Mishra is the Founding Chair and Head, Humanities and Social Sciences at the Institute of Technology, Nirma University. She leads an interdisciplinary department serving engineering students across all programs with the firm belief that the humanities are not optional in STEM institutions but essential to shaping reflective, ethical, and socially responsible engineers. A scholar of the teaching-learning process and digital humanities, Dr. Mishra explores how human-centered STEM education can cultivate critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and interdisciplinary learning within engineering education. Her research develops diagnostic instruments, reflective learning frameworks, and curricular models that examine how these capacities can be systematically embedded and assessed within engineering education.
Dr. Mishra is the John Sayers Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, and has trained at Oxford, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University. As a Shastri Indo-Canadian Visiting Scholar, she researched higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) in engineering classrooms, work that has anchored her sustained scholarship on critical thinking pedagogy. A prolific published author, she conceptualized India’s first digital humanities minor course for engineering students, authored the book Introduction to Critical Thinking, and is Principal Investigator of projects funded by agencies including ICSSR.
As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Mishra is co-designing and validating interdisciplinary STEM-humanities curricular frameworks within the computer science capstone sequence. Upon her return, she will establish a STEM-Humanities Curriculum Innovation Lab and launch a MOOC, Technology, Ethics, and Society, translating evidence-based models for human-centered engineering education aligned with India’s NEP 2020 and U.S. priorities for accountable science.