Purvaja Modak is a public policy professional with eight years of research and management experience with policy think tanks in India. Her research focuses on issues of global economic governance, international trade and finance, economic diplomacy and multilateral financial institutions. Her research is presented to the Indian government, the Indian corporate sector and to multilateral agencies and forums in the form of policy proposals. 

She is a Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow with the Global Economic Governance Initiative at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, advising on the G20. She is an invited member of the Indo Pacific Circle, a curated network of early and mid-career scholars working on emerging issues in the Indo-Pacific region. Purvaja has also worked as the Program Manager for Business and Policy at the Asia Society India Centre, as a Research Fellow, International Relations – Geoeconomics at the Centre for Public Policy Research (CPPR) and as a Researcher for Geoeconomic Studies and the Manager of the Research Office at Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations. She was also a fellow at the 2nd G20 Global Leadership Programme 2019, hosted by the Korean Development Institute (KDI) and the Korean Ministry of Strategy and Finance.

Purvaja enjoys meeting new people, cooking and exploring food and culture from different countries, reading books of historical fiction and doing mandala art. 

Her wish to keep intellectually engaged while she came to Harvard to accompany her husband led her to audit various classes within the Harvard ecosystem. She recognised that spouses and partners of Harvard students also needed a platform to come together and discuss learnings from the various courses they audited during their stint in Boston. She also felt that spouses and partners of incoming students needed a platform to understand and navigate the auditing process and gain access to the best professors and classmates. 

Her husband, Akshay Mathur is currently an Edward Mason Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, pursuing a mid-career Masters in Public Administration. Their joint passion for academic excellence and scholarship led to the formation of the HSSPA Auditing group.