Ms. Soumya AK graduated in 2018 from National Law University, Delhi. She worked in a leading all service firm before shifting to a criminal justice reform and litigation center, Project 39A where she has worked for over two years on issues pertaining to mental health and criminal justice in India. As part of her work, she has also worked on death penalty cases with mental health concerns. She has also developed a first-of-its-kind course on forensic mental health in collaboration with Monash University at Australia. Currently, she is working on an empirical study on the insanity defense in India and leads the communications and outreach work at Project 39A.
At Columbia University, she is specializing in the domain of criminal justice and human rights, with a specific focus on examining institutional barriers and development of access to justice mechanisms for the vulnerable and marginalized, from the perspective of the right to a fair and just trial. On returning to India, she intends to continue with her focus on these issues and expects that the master’s degree will inform and enable both her research on these issues as well as advocacy and capacity building with the stakeholders in the criminal justice system.