Kala Seetharam Sridhar is a Professor at the Centre for Research in Urban Affairs, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru, India. She has been an Honorary Fellow (during June—August 2024) and a Visiting Fellow (during March—August 2025) at Stanford University's Center for South Asia. She has visited George Mason University's Global South Hub in 2023 and the United Nations University's World Institute for Development Economics Research multiple times. As a Fulbright fellow, Kala was hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2021 and 2022. She has also conducted research for the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and won national and international awards for her research on urbanization. Kala is one of the Managing Editors of the Journal of Social and Economic Development (Springer).