Parijat Chakrabarti investigates how we can design innovation ecosystems and market institutions to sustain long-term social and ecological well-being. For his doctoral studies, I examined these questions in the context of food systems in East Africa as the region grapples with climate change, uneven globalization, and rapid technology uptake. In addition to his research, he has worked for various development organizations including the World Bank, FSD Kenya, the William Davidson Institute, and the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, building partnerships across sectors and applying research to practice.
As a Fritz Family Tech and Society Fellow, he co-founded the Symbiocene Initiative to connect academia, practitioners, and funders to work on complex challenges at the climate-food-biodiversity nexus. In our inaugural project, we have partnered with UNDP C3 Labs and the MIT Sustainability Initiative to reimagine how we organize and finance innovation for green economy transitions, with pilots to be launched in Kenya and Thailand. This work combines rigorous research with design-forward, real-economy practice including the development of an innovation methodology, a supporting finance facility, and an AI-enabled knowledge repository.
Parijat holds a PhD in Sociology from Princeton University and a BA in Economics and Sociology from UC Berkeley, and previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Early in his career, he worked various jobs including: at a research unit at ETH Zürich, on a dairy farm in the Argentine pampas, and for a studio photographer back home in California.