Suresh Naidu, an Indian American professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, has won the Institute of Global Politics’ (IGP) 2026-27 faculty grant award for supporting innovative research on global challenges and public policy.
Naidu, Jack Wang and Echo Ren Professor of Economics won the award for his project titled “Conditions of Work and Conditions of Care in the Minnesota Long-Term Care Industry,” according to an IGP release.
This project will assess the direct relationship between the working conditions of nursing-home employees and the healthcare outcomes of their residents, culminating in a policy report and a dedicated webinar event.
READ: 11 South Asia research projects get Harvard institute grants (April 24, 2026)
Naidu was a Harvard Academy fellow from 2008-2010, and has been at Columbia since 2010. He works on political economy and historical labor markets. He has interests in the economic effects of democracy and non-democracy, monopsony in labor markets, the economics of American slavery, guest worker migration, and labor unions and labor organizing.
In addition to being a faculty co-director Political Economy, he is external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Naidu has a B.Math in Pure Mathematics from the Unversity of Waterloo, a MA in economics from the University of Massachussetts-Amherst, and a PhD in economics from the University of California at Berkeley.
Read: Four Indian Americans among 2026 class of Guggenheim Fellows (April 16, 2026)
Seven projects, led by Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) faculty and their collaborators, will explore topics ranging from household finance and economic development to the geopolitics of critical minerals, the future of long-term care, electricity grid modernization, democratic leadership, workplace technology, and the politics of extraction in the Amazon.
“This year’s grantees reflect the breadth and depth of expertise across SIPA’s faculty, from energy markets in the Amazon to the economics of the Arctic,” said Keren Yarhi‑Milo, dean of Columbia SIPA and cofounder of IGP.
This year’s cohort builds on the momentum of IGP’s inaugural faculty grant awards in 2025–26. In one of IGP’s inaugural projects grantees Tamar Mitts and Rumela Sen brought together SIPA and Data Science graduate students for a hands-on workshop on generative AI in India, examining how emerging democracies regulate political communications and AI risk.