Rajika Bhandari is Deputy Vice President, Research and Evaluation, at the Institute of International Education (IIE) in New York where she provides strategic oversight of the Institute’s research and evaluation activities and leads two major research projects—Open Doors and Project Atlas—that measure international higher education mobility at the domestic (US) and international levels. She is a frequent speaker and author on the topic of mobility and is the author of four books on global student mobility, the most recent being International Students and Global Mobility in Higher Education: National Trends and New Directions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Another recent book, Higher Education on the Move: New Developments in Global Mobility (IIE, 2009), won the Best Book Award by the Comparative and International Education Society’s Higher Education Special Interest Group. Dr. Bhandari also oversees program evaluations of IIE’s international scholarship and fellowship programs. 

Before joining IIE, Dr. Bhandari was a Senior Researcher at MPR Associates, an educational research and evaluation firm in Berkeley, California, where she conducted research for state departments of education, the National Center for Education Statistics, and foundations. She also served as the Assistant Director for Evaluation at the Mathematics and Science Education Network at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She holds a doctoral degree in Psychology from North Carolina State University and a BA (Honors) in Psychology from the University of Delhi, India.