Sonalde Desai (Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland and Professor and Centre Director, NCAER-National Data Innovation Center, New Delhi) is a demographer whose work deals primarily with social transformation and its impact on lives of individuals with a focus on education, employment and maternal and child health. She is particularly interested in gender and class inequalities and ways in which economic transformations and public policies have a potential to reshape them. While much of her research focuses on South Asia, she has also engaged in comparative studies across Asia, Latin America and Sub Saharan Africa.  

She holds a joint appointment at University of Maryland and National Council of Applied Economics (NCAER) in New Delhi. At NCAER she is the Founding Director of a new NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre, designed to serve as a hub of data collection innovations to enhance government and academic data collection systems in India. She also leads India Human Development Survey of over 40,000 households which is the only national panel survey in India providing a rich public resource for studying transformation of the Indian society in the 21st Century. 

Desai has published articles in a wide range of sociological and demographic journals including American Sociological Review, Demography, Population and Development Review and Feminist Studies as well as several books and serves on editorial boards of several international journals. She received Ph.D. from Stanford University and post-doctoral training at University of Chicago and RAND Corporation.