Chaitanya Giri

Dr. Chaitanya Giri is a Fellow at ORF’s Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology. His work focuses on India’s space ecosystem and its interlinkages with the global space economy, academia-industry innovation and training interface for emerging STEM domains, and the evolving concepts of Planetary Security and One Health.

Dr. Giri sits on the Advisory Board of the Satcom Industry Association India and is a Nominated Member of the Senate of the University of Mumbai. He has previously worked at the Research and Information System for Developing Countries (2021-24) and the Indian Council for Global Relations (2012-21). He had a consulting stint at the National Security Council Secretariat (2019-20) and the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre of the Department of Space (2023-24). He was an invited member of the NITI Aayog Committee on Space Economy (2022) and the International Cooperation Review Committee of the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Earth Sciences (2020-21).

Dr. Giri has authored ‘India in the Second Space Age of Interplanetary Connectivity’ (Routledge, 2022). He serves as the columnist of Science India magazine and is a co-editor of Srushtidnyan, a Marathi language science magazine). He has a Ph.D. from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, France and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany, for which he received the 2014 Dieter Rampacher Prize of the Max Planck Society, Munich. He worked as the co-investigator of the Philae Lander of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission. He has worked as a planetary scientist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, the Carnegie Institution of Washington and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He has participated in numerous track 1.5 and 2.0 bilateral diplomatic interactions.