Pathik Pathak is a passionate believer in the power of students as leaders for social change and the Founding Director of the Social Impact Lab (SiL). Under his leadership, SiL has supported more than 5,000 students on their leadership journeys since it was founded in 2017.
Many have described their time with SiL as transformative, and the most influential on their future careers. For Pathik, higher education isn’t just a place to ready students for the workplace or to develop subject specialists but a place to grow leaders who are world ready. Teaching has been his passion for as long as he can remember. It’s his conviction – and his experience – that the application of subject knowledge and skills in real-world situations focused on the social and environmental can be transformative for students – and society at large.
He is a Professor at the University of Southampton. As recognition of his work in higher education, he has been made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Advance HE Senior Fellow. He is also a World Economic Forum agenda shaper, and an UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab Expert, having won four international educational grants which have helped to shape educational practices in the UK, India, Thailand and Vietnam. He has written more than 70 articles for the Guardian, the Conversation, the Times of India and the Hindustan Times. His TED talk, Careers of Value, has been viewed more than 75k times.