Assistant Professor Udita Sanga has been named an Advancing Leadership Fellow by the Belmont Forum, an international partnership working to address global environmental challenges through collaborative, transdisciplinary research.
Sanga with local research team and community members in Tapkara, Jharkhand. Photo credit: Udita Sanga
Udita Sanga Named Advancing Leadership Fellow at the Belmont Forum
Assistant Professor Dr. Udita Sanga has been selected for the Advancing Leadership Program of the Belmont Forum—an international partnership supporting transdisciplinary research to address environmental change.
The Advancing Leadership Program brings together researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and community leaders from around the world to co-create knowledge and research goals for tackling complex challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, food insecurity, and resource sustainability. The yearlong fellowship emphasizes collaboration across disciplines, sectors, and knowledge systems, including the meaningful inclusion of local and Indigenous perspectives in research and decision-making. “The ALP fellowship enables collaboration with indigenous designers, including my Transdisciplinary (TD) pair, Mr. Sudhir John Horo, to develop research and design protocols that act as a governance layer, safeguarding community authority, consent, and authorship,” Sanga said.
An interdisciplinary systems scientist, Sanga focuses her work on advancing climate-resilient transformations of food and agricultural systems. For more than 15 years, her research has spanned West Africa and South Asia, addressing issues such as agricultural sustainability, climate resilience, poverty traps, food security, and sustainable resource management.
Indigenous designers leading a co-design process grounded in community knowledge. Photo credit: Adivasi Knowledge Collective
Central to Sanga’s approach is collaborative, participatory research. “Through this project, we aim to co-create community-driven design frameworks that make research accessible while preserving knowledge of ownership, cultural identity, and intergenerational continuity. I am also excited to learn from other TD pairs across various contexts working on addressing global environmental change.”
Sanga currently leads an action-oriented research initiative in Jharkhand, India, focused on revitalizing intergenerational knowledge for sustainable food futures. The project bridges Indigenous knowledge, systems science, and anthropology, exploring foodways—how food is grown, harvested, prepared, and shared—as both ecological processes and culturally meaningful practices shaped by history, power, and social relationships.
Her selection as an Advancing Leadership Fellow highlights the strong alignment between her work and the Belmont Forum’s mission to support boundary-spanning leaders who integrate diverse ways of knowing to develop inclusive, practical, and context-specific solutions to global sustainability challenges.
