Kavya Mukhija Disability Inclusion Academic and Advocate

Video 11/20 in our Inclusive Research Guidance for Early Career Researchers

Kavya Mukhija, a Chevening Scholar and MSc student at UCL East's Global Disability Innovation Hub, won the 2024 Diana Award for her work on disability inclusion.

In May 2024, she co-authored a chapter on education access for children with disabilities in India, contributing to a Supreme Court ruling in November 2024 that recognised accessibility as a fundamental right.

Kavya founded Namastey Disability, a virtual peer support network, and is the COO and Trustee of Chronic Pain India. Her advocacy led to the inclusion of the Pain Disability Scale in India’s disability assessment guidelines, helping millions with chronic pain. As an NCPEDP-Javed Abidi Fellow, she leads research on accessible tourism and reaches over 100,000 people through digital content raising awareness about disability stigma.

Funding information:

The TIDAL Network+ is a collaboration between UCL, Strathclyde, Salford and Loughborough Universities, led by Prof Cathy Holloway, Academic Director of Global Disability Innovation Hub and Professor at UCL. The research team includes Prof Laurence Kenney (Salford University), Prof Richard Bibb (Nottingham Trent University), Prof Mikko Koria (Loughborough University) and Dr Arjan Buis (Strathclyde University). We are funded from 1st September 2021 to 31st December 2024 by the EPSRC as a Healthcare Technologies New Challenges Network Plus (EP/W000717/1).

TIDAL stands for, ‘Transformative Innovation in the Delivery of Assisted Living Products and Services’. Our purpose is to improve the quality of Assistive Technologies (AT) and hence the lives of the people who use them, their families and carers.