Namrata Kala is a Scientific Advisor for IPA's Entrepreneurship & Private Sector Development Program. She is a W. Maurice Young (1961) Career Development Professor of Management and an Associate Professor in Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Namrata is an economist with research interests in environmental and development economics. Her current research projects include studying how firms and households learn about and adapt to environmental change and regulation, the returns to environmental technologies, and the returns to worker training and incentives.

From fall 2015 to 2017, Namrata was a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in environmental economics from the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale. She also holds a BA (Honors) in Economics from Delhi University, and an MA in International and Development Economics from Yale University.