Ashwini Deshpande is Professor of Economics and the Founding Director of Centre for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA) at Ashoka University, India. Her Ph.D. and early publications have been on the international debt crisis of the 1980s. Subsequently, she has been working on the economics of discrimination and affirmative action, with a focus on caste and gender in India. She has published extensively in leading scholarly journals. She is the author of “Grammar of Caste: economic discrimination in contemporary India", Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2011 (Hardcover) and 2017 (Paperback); and “Affirmative Action in India”, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, Oxford India Short Introductions (OISI) series, 2013. She is the editor of several volumes and is currently editing the "Handbook of Economics of Discrimination and Affirmative Action" to be published as a part of the Springer Major Reference Works.  She received the EXIM Bank award for outstanding dissertation (now called the IERA Award) in 1994; the 2007 VKRV Rao Award for Indian economists under 45; and the Skoch award for gender economics in 2022.