Invited Faculty
Ashka Naik is an activist researcher and a food policy expert with more than two decades of international experience working across food and climate justice movements, corporate accountability issues, multilateral policymaking, and women’s rights. She has served in several leadership roles at mission-driven organizations in the U.S. and India.
Having received her formative education at a Gandhian school in South Asia, the issues of justice, peace building, and equity remain foundational across all her work.
Currently Ashka serves as the managing director of research and policy at an international human rights organization, where she leads strategic campaign development, critical corporate research, international policy work, and equity-centered analysis focused on power and democracy. Her specific commitment and interest have been focused on tackling structural and commercial determinants of nutrition, well-being, and public health, while challenging commodification, privatization, and industrialization of ancient, Indigenous, and rich food systems, especially in the Global South.
Ashka serves on the steering committee of Geneva Global Health Hub and on several other advisory and expert committees focused on food systems governance, accountability, and sovereignty. She continues to work closely with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Committee on World Food Security’s (CFS) ecosystem, in addition to providing interventions for several United Nations’ treaty making processes, such as the Pandemic Treaty, the Business and Human Rights Treaty, and the Plastics Treaty, to safeguard politics and policies of food, agriculture, and public health from corporate capture and center the voices of frontline communities in their mandate.
She is currently pursuing her doctorate degree from the University of Massachusetts Boston, investigating the intersectionality across food security, women’s rights, and policy infrastructure in South Asia. Her undergraduate and graduate education has been in the fields of architectural design and sustainability from India and the U.K. Ashka’s research and policy work has been published in media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Al Jazeera, and academic platforms such as Stanford Social Innovation Review, World Nutrition, and Development.
To follow her love for land, food, and ancestral roots, Ashka dreams of running an organic cooperative farm in the foothills of the Himalayas, the land of the Chipko movement, where a small group of tribal women hugged trees to save them from massive industrial logging, reining in destructive power through nonviolent organized action.
Ashka speaks English, Urdu, Hindi, and Gujarati, as well as has working knowledge of Sanskrit, Marathi, and Punjabi.
