Varada completed her BA LL B (Hons.) from the National University of Advanced Legal Studies, Kochi, with gold medals for overall academic performance in the programme, and in the subjects of Constitutional Law, Criminal Law and Administrative Law. She also has a PG Diploma in Cyber Law and Cyber Forensics from NLSIU, Bengaluru, and an LLM from the University of Melbourne in 2022 as an Alex Chernov Scholar. During this time, she also worked as a research staff in the University of Melbourne’s Academic Research Office.

Varada has litigation experience of over four years. She began her career as an Associate at Wadia Ghandy & Co., Mumbai where she was engaged in arbitration and litigation matters for two years. Thereafter, she assisted the former State Attorney of Kerala, Mr. K V Sohan as his Research Assistant for another two years. After her LLM, she resumed her work as an advocate in the High Court of Kerala for a brief stint before turning to academia. She cleared the UGC NET in 2022 and has worked as Guest Faculty at NUALS, Kochi where she taught Insurance Law and Banking Law.

Areas of interest: Human rights, women and child rights; however, she will be focusing more on Labour Law, Professional Ethics, Medical Law and Ethics at NLSIU.

Outside of work, she is drawn to music, poetry and recreational cooking.

Focus area at NLSIU: She is currently assisting Dr. Saurabh Bhattarcharjee, Associate Professor of Law, in the ‘Labour Law-I’ course for fourth year students of the BA LLB (Hons) programme. She is also involved in teaching the Professional Ethics module for a Bridge Course student. Apart from this, she is engaged in the PG Diploma programme for Medical Law and Ethics offered by the PACE department.

Vidya was a researcher at NLU Delhi on an interdisciplinary project (under an MoU between IIT-Delhi and NLU-Delhi). The project aimed at developing a framework for potential algorithmic bias with a specific lens on legal applications within the Indian context. She was a practising advocate in Delhi for two years, before deciding to venture into academics. She has a bachelor’s degree in Law from the University of Delhi and an LL.M (Business Laws) from NLU Delhi where she secured a gold medal for Competition Law. Prior to this, she worked as a Cisco firewall engineer for three years having obtained a B. Tech degree from Pondicherry University.

Areas of interest: Her areas of interest are tech policy and competition law.

Focus area at NLSIU: Currently, she is co-teaching the core course – Reading Judgments and Statutes, for  first year students of the Master’s Programme in Public Policy (MPP).