Sandeep Mertia is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, and Urban Doctoral Fellow at New York University. He is an ICT engineer by training, and former Research Associate at The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. He is broadly interested in historical and anthropological research on computing, media-technologies, urbanism, and futures. His dissertation ethnographically follows the emergent computational cultures at the intersections of the state and technology start-ups in India. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation's doctoral dissertation research improvement award in the field of Science & Technology Studies.
Sandeep is the editor of “Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India” (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2020), and the convener of the Lives of Data workshop series at Sarai-CSDS. His work has appeared in the Economic & Political Weekly, The Fibreculture Journal, Computational Culture, Sarai, LSE Impact, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, DataKind, and other venues. He holds a BTech from the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology. He has been associated with community groups like DataMeet and HillHacks. He has also taught school children for Sambhav and Make A Difference. Twitter: @SandeepMertia.