Ms Catriona Child

Catriona Child is Executive Director of The Highland Institute (THI), Kohima, Nagaland. Her work focuses on institutional leadership, research administration, mentoring, ethics, writing, publication strategy, and programme development. She supports and enables field-based scholarship in Northeast India by helping to build the institutional, editorial, and collaborative structures through which researchers, analysts, students, and community partners can carry out their work.

Her role at The Highland Institute centres on strategic coordination, grant development, academic partnerships, project oversight, staff mentoring, and the dissemination of research through publications, reports, journals, and public-facing outputs. She works closely with THI analysts and collaborators, supporting project design, editorial development, supervision, and institutional planning.

Child has long-standing experience in academic editing, environmental and public health communication, institutional development, and community-based academic work in Northeast India. Her earlier professional background includes editorial leadership in environmental publishing, communications consultancy, and publication support for international organisations, academic journals, and research institutions.

Her areas of interest include:

• •Administration and institutional development
• •Academic writing, editing, and publication strategy
• •Mentoring and postgraduate support
• •Ethics, permissions, and responsible research practice
• •Community-based academic work in Northeast India
• •Environmental, health, and policy communication
• •Oral history, archival methods, and documentation support
• •Interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge dissemination

At The Highland Institute, Child has contributed to the development, coordination, and dissemination of a wide range of interdisciplinary projects. As Executive Director, she leads institutional strategy, supports research teams, develops partnerships, and oversees academic and public-facing outputs.

She has supported projects connected to Indigenous knowledge systems, environmental humanities, public health, oral history, visual archives, documentary work, and climate change. Her role has included grant development, project coordination, supervision of staff and volunteers, editorial guidance, and support for collaborative research processes.

She was Project Coordinator for the Earthkeepers Project, funded by IDRC, Canada, which documented traditional ecological knowledge and climate change perceptions along the Myanmar–Nagaland border. Her role focused on coordination, documentation support, community collaboration, and the development of participatory approaches.

She also served as Project Manager for the Global Health Research Group project on surgical capacity and access in Northeast India, which resulted in a peer-reviewed publication in PLOS ONE in 2024.

• 2024 — 'How ready is the health care system in Northeast India for surgical delivery? A mixed-methods study on surgical capacity and need' in PLOS ONE, Vol. 19, Issue 6, Article e0287941. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287941
• 2021 — 'Conversation Pieces: How Digital Technologies Might Reinvigorate and Reveal the Social Lives of Objects' in Materiality and Visuality in North East India, Springer.