It is my pleasure to welcome Mani Pande to the Wikimedia team.

Mani joins as the Senior Research Analyst, Global Development. In this role, Mani will work across the Global Development team and the organization as a whole to design and lead research work that helps us make good strategic decisions and evaluate the results of the work that we do (to make even better decisions). In addition, Mani will help to design and deploy metrics for key Global Development areas so that we can monitor our performance against the strategic plan.

A native of New Delhi, Mani brings a global perspective to our work. Her passion lies in understanding how consumers use technology to map opportunity spaces for new product strategies and industry growth. She has a special interest in the transformative technology experiences brought about through the use of mobile devices by emerging market consumers. She has also extensively studied the growth of open source movement.

Mani is an accomplished quantitative researcher & has conducted surveys studying technology usage, sustainability and health in US, India and China. Mani is an experienced ethnographer having conducted work in India, Brazil, Russia and China on technology usage and studying women in the software industry. Mani worked for the Institute for the Future, a forecasting research organization based in Palo Alto, for over 5 years. She has a PhD in Sociology from Kansas State University and an MA and MPhil in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Before moving to the US to pursue her PhD, Mani worked as a reporter-cum-sub-editor for The Times of India. Her beats were media (favorite assignments covering a Cindy Crawford press conference & Yanni's show at the Taj Mahal) & crime (no favorites here, just saw a lot of gross stuff).

Mani loves to cook. Her specialties, Thai red curry, enchiladas in mole sauce (from scratch) & chicken biryani. She posts pics of food that she cooks on Twitter. You can see some of the pics (@manipande on Twitter).

Welcome Mani!