Shikha Bhattacharjee L’13

Shikha Silliman Bhattacharjeeis a human rights lawyer with more than a decade of experience working with grassroots campaigns and civil society organizations in the U.S. and South Asia, using legal, media, community organizing and social work approaches. 

Shikha has been an Ella Baker fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a fellow in the Asia Division at Human Rights Watch and a Fulbright fellow at Swayam. She has worked with numerous organizations in South Asia including Human Rights Law Network, Jan Sahas Social Development Society, PRADAN (Professional Assistance for Development Action), the Society for Labour and Development and the South Asia Women’s Fund. In 2015, Shikha jointly founded HELM Social Design Studio, the first social design studio in South Asia dedicated to partnering with human rights defenders and their organizations to ideate, fund and build social design solutions that promote human rights and access to justice. 

Shikha holds a BA from Yale in English and Ethnicity, Race and Migration.  At the University of Pennsylvania Law School, she completed a JD as a Toll Public Interest Scholar, held Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships to study rights advocacy in India and completed an interdisciplinary certificate in Global Human Rights. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at the University of California Berkeley.