Dr. Niharika Thakkar

Niharika is an insightful, creative, and restlessly ambitious individual, with a rabid social conscience. She ardently believes that mental health awareness is necessitated in the world right now, particularly more so in countries like India, where the insatiable demand of our population for mental health care is woefully underserved.

Niharika has a Bachelors’s and Masters’s in Clinical Psychology from Fergusson College, University of Pune. At college, she excelled in academics and shined through when she was awarded the “most deserving candidate of the year” scholarship in her final year in 2011. After completing her post-graduation, she worked as a counselor for over 4 years, where her work presented her with the opportunity to work with a gamut of people and leverage her knowledge of the field in variegated domains including testing and diagnosis, child & adult therapy, and rehabilitation.

“Working as a psychotherapist helped me understand myself better, gain insight and self-awareness, but more importantly, I found my passion and my purpose.”

Her experience working with end clients not only confirmed her interest and aptitude in the field of Psychology, but also it was the opportunity to understand and reflect human emotions, feelings, and sentiments that she came to value the most!

In 2012, she cleared her National Eligibility Test by the University Grants Commission of India for Ph.D. and lectureship, which prompted her to start working towards a more ambitious degree, a doctorate. After gaining gratifying work experience in India, Niharika was accepted as a Ph.D. scholar in 2014 at the prestigious Leiden University, Netherlands, an institution that prides itself with names like Albert Einstein and Rembrandt on its alumni list. She received a full grant to pursue her Ph.D. in the field of “Bullying and Victimization in junior high schools; the role of students’ characteristics, teacher’s attitude and socio-demographic contexts in school”.

Niharika has now completed her Ph.D. and works as the Director of Global Health and Education at the Hsopital for Special Surgery at Cornell Medical in New York. She also dedicates all her free time and energy towards PsychLine.in that she considers to be her mission. She has also worked as a Psychology teacher and school counselor and has several international publications to her name.

She has been an avid Chess player since childhood and is a hopeless dog lover. However, if there is one thing for which she would leave everything else in the world behind, it would be surfing!