Gautam N. Yadama is Professor and the Dean of Boston College School of Social Work, Boston College.
His research is focused on understanding poverty and environment dynamics, and interventions to address the attendant social, economic, environment, and health outcomes. His research in China, funded by Kaufman Foundation, is directed at understanding the way rural communities in China engage in collective action and collaborate with the state in the supply and maintenance of quasi-public goods such as rural schools, health clinics, sanitation, and rural infrastructure. In India, he has implemented a randomized control trial to study the sustainability of new and efficient energy technologies in rural communities to reduce household air pollution and improve the health and wellbeing of women and children. His book – Fires, Fuel & the Fate of 3 Billion: State of the Energy Impoverished (Oxford University Press) outlines an argument for transdisciplinary research to tackle complex problems such as household air pollution that reside at the intersections of poverty, environment, and health. He is a member of the Implementation Science Network on Clean Cooking (ISN) at the Fogarty Institute of the National Institutes of Health, USA. He has collaborated with George Soros’ Open Society Foundation in training several cohorts (1999-2014) of young social policy and social work professionals from Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and the Republic of Georgia.