Advisory Board
Dipak Gyawali
Dipak Gyawali is currently Pragya (Academician) of the Royal Nepal Academy of Science and Technology (RONAST), research director of the Institute of Social and Environmental Transition, Nepal (ISET-N) and co-editor of the biannual interdisciplinary journal WATER NEPAL. He served as His Majesty's Minister of Water Resources (responsible for power, irrigation and flood control) between November 2002 and May 2003, and initiated reforms in the electricity and irrigation sectors focused on decentralization and promotion of rural say in governance.He is a life member of The International Water Academy/Oslo, Society of Electrical Engineers Nepal as well as Nepal Engineers Association. He is also a member of the international advisory board of Oxford University’s James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization, the New York Academy of Sciences, and is a
coordinator of the “water and security” theme of the Indian Ocean Research Group. He is a trustee of the King Mahendra Trust for Nature Conservation (KMTNC) and a board member of Nepal Water for Health (NEWAH). By profession, he is a hydroelectric power engineer (Moskovsky Energetichesky Institute, USSR) as well as a political economist studying resource use (University of California, Berkeley).In his earlier professional life he was a government engineer from 1979 to 1987 in a wide range of assignments – urban and rural power supply projects, water resources negotiations with India and angladesh, official investigation commission on foreign-aided engineering projects etc. After the democratic changes in Nepal in 1990, he was asked by the new government of Nepal to help define a new hydropower and energy development policy in the changed context in Nepal. He was also nominated to the board of directors of Nepal's Electricity Authority (NEA), from which he resigned because of differences with the government and World Bank over the proposed Arun-3 hydroelectric project.He has been a member of the Oxford Commission on Sustainable Consumption based at the Oxford Centre for the Environment, Ethics and Society (OCEES, UK), a member of the International Advisory Board of Battelle Pacific Northwest National Lab (USA) for its state-of-the-art study Human Choice and Climate Change, as well as a member of the International Research Committee of the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies (RCSS) in Colombo. He has been a visiting scholar at Queen Elizabeth House in Oxford University, at the Norwegian Center for Research in Organization and Management in Bergen, at the International Environmental Academy in Geneva and at the London School of Economics. In the mid-1990s, he served a five-year term as chairman of Swabalamban, a grassroots voluntary NGO dedicated to the task of poverty alleviation in fourteen districts of rural Nepal.Since 1987, he has been pursuing an independent interdisciplinary research agenda on society-technology-resource base interface, with water and energy as entry points. His current research interests focus on development-induced ordeals, philosophical and social adaptation to science and technology, social response to disasters, and pluralized institutional terrain in water and energy systems.
Current Position: Professor and Director of the Centre for Environment Studies and Socioresponsive Engineering (CESSE), Muffakham Jah College of Engineering & Technology, Hyderabad, India
Ali Uddin Ansari studied mechanical engineering at the Aligarh Muslim University and the University of Florida before he became Professor and Director of the Centre for Environment Studies and Socioresponsive Engineering (CESSE) at Muffakham Jah College of Engineering & Technology in Hyderabad, India. His teaching experience in India and the United States is complemented by his commitment to the promotion of environmental and social causes related to engineering.
Mr. Mahabir Pun
Current Position: Team Leader, Nepal Wireless Network
Mr. Mahabir Pun is a Nepalese teacher known for his extensive work in applying wireless technologies to develop remote areas of the Nepal . In 2007 he was awarded the Magsaysay Award, which is considered by some to be the Nobel prize of Asia.
