Neerad Deshmukh is a doctoral candidate. His dissertation focuses on how social stratification shapes health and demographic outcomes in India during periods of rapid economic, demographic, and epidemiological change. He is a Research Assistant with the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), where he contributes to questionnaire design, instrument development, and field operations for Wave 3 of the survey.

His dissertation asks how traditional forms of social stratification continue to shape health and demographic outcomes as India experiences sustained economic growth, widespread poverty transitions, population aging, and increasing exposure to climate-related stress. The three chapters examine, respectively, how economic growth has shaped women's nutritional status and socioeconomic inequalities in BMI across two decades; how poverty transitions and downward mobility affect functional decline and mortality among older adults; and how repeated drought exposure interacts with socioeconomic vulnerability to produce health inequality in aging rural populations.

Before entering the doctoral program, Neerad designed and implemented large-scale surveys across India for both the private sector and policy research institutions. He worked as a Research Associate at the National Council of Applied Economic Research's National Data Innovation Center in New Delhi, where he led experiments on survey methodology. Earlier, he worked at GfK's Social Research Division across health, education, and opinion research projects.