Niruban Balachandran

Program Management Officer, Governance Global Practice, The World Bank
Senior Fellow at the Center for Peace Communications

USA | GOVERNANCE

Niruban Balachandran is a 2017 Master of Public Administration (MPA) graduate of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Niruban is a foreign policy and international aid professional, with research interests in international order and strategy, the future of US foreign policy in Southeast Asia, community-driven development (CDD) effectiveness, and interfaith peacebuilding/diplomacy.

Niruban has served in the World Bank since 2013, and has lived and worked in the Americas, Europe, and East Asia for over a decade. He is also former Director of Strategy & Programs for the Jakarta-based interfaith nonprofit, 1000 Abrahamic Circles.

An American from California of Sri Lankan descent, Niruban speaks his native English, Mandarin Chinese, Bahasa Indonesia, and French. He was a winner of the World Bank’s Innovation Challenge in 2014, and received his Bachelors degree in Psychology from Rutgers with a minor in Asian Studies and a concentration in Mandarin Chinese.

His writing has been published in Yale Global, The Jerusalem Post, Tablet, and The Jakarta Post, as well as by institutions such as Stanford, Harvard, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and the East-West Center. He is a member of Young Professionals in Foreign Policy, and was honored by the New America Foundation as one of the nation’s 40 AAPI Foreign Policy Next Generation Leaders.