Professor Minati Panda is currently visiting the Department of International and Transcultural Studies, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York for the academic year 2019-2020 under the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence programme. She has been a Professor of Cultural-Critical Psychology and Education at the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and is the Director of the National Multilingual Education Resource Consortium (NMRC), JNU. Netherland. She is the former chairperson of this centre and the coordinator of the Centre for Advanced Studies (UGC sponsored), JNU in education. She has worked extensively in the interdisciplinary areas of language, mind and cognition, multilingual education and child rights, language policy, tribal cultures and mathematics, creativity and critical pedagogy. She has published three books and several research articles in these areas. She has also edited 40 bi/multilingual early readers for Kondh and Saora (two major tribes from southern Odisha) children. She provided academic support to several Non-Government organizations in India for the development of multilingual teaching-learning materials and books and also teacher development for multilingual pedagogy.  

She has been an adviser to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs and the Government of Sri Lanka for language policy and social justice. She also headed the Task Force for the education of tribal children for the 12^th Five Year Plan (2012-2017) of the Government of India.  As one of the Directors of the Multilingual Education Plus programme (sponsored by the Van Leer Foundation, Netherland) she steer-headed many culturally oriented new pedagogic tools for the teaching of mathematics and language to tribal children in Odisha. She was a consultant to the Government of India for tribal education in the mid-1990s and had authored one of the unique multilingual book, ERAI ERAI for Saora Children.  She had initiated the attitudinal training programmes in 1997-98 in Odisha which subsequently developed into RUPANTER programme for the teachers teaching in tribal areas. She is currently heading two international programmes with the University of Heidelberg, Germany and the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. She has recently concluded two sociolinguistic surveys in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan with support from USAID, Micro Finance and Room to Read and an international collaborative research programme on “Multilingualism and Multiliteracy” with support from ESRC. Her forthcoming book is on language policy in South Asia. She was a visiting faculty at various Universities and departments, some of which include the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC), University of California, San Diego, the Mathematics and Curriculum centre at the Manchester University, the Centre for Linguistics in the University of Hamburg and the ECCE centre at the State University of Long Beach, California.