Our Story

I grew up in the sweltering heat of Chennai and, to be honest, I didn’t live in a world with “researchers.” My dad was an engineer by training and my school, which taught an Indian curriculum, was warm but didn’t have the resources to introduce much beyond math, english, and physics. The paths that life had open for me involved A) Becoming a lawyer, B) Becoming an engineer, or C) Becoming an engineer who later goes to law school to become a lawyer. 

My life changed when I got a full ride to Harvard College. It was a ticket to the US and to a new set of experiences I’d never imagined. I think the most important of which was being selected to do a research program for undergraduates at Harvard Business School called PRIMO. 

The program introduced me to my co-founder and friend, Stephen, but perhaps even more important for me was being introduced to what research is. It was maybe the nerdiest thing I’d ever seen - people spending their entire lives trying to solve problems - but it was something that immediately drew me in (Okay, I’m a nerd.).

After doing the program, I kept on wanting to do more research. I started RAing with a professor in the econ department, I spent a summer studying early childhood education in Tamil Nadu and wrote a thesis about the Right to Education Act in India. After starting my PhD at Oxford, Stephen and I got together to start Lumiere - a social enterprise focused on providing research opportunities for students. 

One thing kept nagging at me though as we worked on Lumiere was that 15-year-old kid in Chennai that I was. Dhruva at 15 was smart, he was hard-working, he was – ok fair enough – a giant nerd. But, he had no opportunity to do research. My family made less than 20,000 USD per year and even with financial aid doing any type of summer program was out of reach. 

With Lumiere, we started from day one with a financial aid program. But, after years and after giving out over $100,000 in aid to students, we felt that we should be doing much more. That’s why we decided to spin out the financial aid program officially and build it into its own non-profit. That’s the Lumiere Research Inclusion Foundation. 

I believe that there are millions of young Dhruva’s out there. And though I don’t know if we’ll get to millions with the foundation, we’re going to try. 

The foundation is not just about me. It's a group of people who are donating their time to share research with young students around the globe. There are hundreds of us involved - from program managers, volunteer researchers, and donors who believe in making research accessible to students.

We're doing this now because technology has finally brought down a wall of access. It used to be that you needed to be on the campus of a university that was over 100 years old to get involved in research. We now know that is not true and I think it's our duty to change it as quickly as possible to get more of the world's best students involved.

I hope that you join us on this journey, whether as a student, mentor or partner. We truly believe that research can change lives - at the least, it changed one life of a 15-year-old kid from Chennai.

- Dhruva