Innovative Research
Revolutionizing Education Through Research
Meet Our Team
Dedicated Research Professionals
Ajit Kumar
Founder
Charu Sharma
Co-Founder
Who We Are
Leading Research Hub Focused on Educational Innovation
Freebirds Lab was founded by Dr. Ajit Kumar and Dr. Charu Sharma, both mathematics faculty at Shiv Nadar University, out of a conviction that has followed them through years in the classroom: the people who understand teaching best are the people who teach. Yet the teacher’s insight — hard-won, tested daily against thirty restless minds — rarely travels beyond the room in which it was earned.
We are at the very beginning. Freebirds Lab has no long history to point to, and we think that is the honest and exciting place to start. What we have is a clear picture of what is missing, and the resolve to build it.
What We Are Building
Our ambition is to become a hub of educational research for the Delhi NCR region and, in time, for India. The region holds an extraordinary concentration of talented teachers — practitioners who have quietly developed remarkable ways of explaining, engaging, and assessing, and who have no route to turn that craft into something durable. There is no lab for them. No colleague to co-author with, no path to publication, no structure that converts a good idea into a tested method. Freebirds Lab intends to be that ecosystem. We want to bring these teachers together and give them:
A place to develop pedagogy — space, method, and collaborators to take an intuition and shape it into a designed, documented, testable approach.
A path to publication — mentorship and support in framing research questions, gathering evidence, and writing for peer-reviewed venues, so that classroom insight enters the scholarly record.
Workshops built on their work — the means to translate validated pedagogy into training that other teachers can actually use.
A stake in what they create — by helping commercialize these workshops, we ensure that teachers are rewarded for their intellectual contribution, not merely thanked for it.
Recognition and remuneration are not incidental to this mission. A research culture only sustains itself when the researchers can afford to stay in it.
The Gap We Have Chosen
Every school prospectus speaks of the whole child. Every college mission statement mentions character, resilience, empathy. Almost none of them can tell you how a particular student’s emotional growth has changed over a year — because almost none of them measure it.
Emotional quotient has become something education professes rather than something it practices. It sits outside the curriculum, outside assessment, outside the report card. It is celebrated in language and abandoned in implementation.
We believe this is a solvable problem, and it is the first one we intend to solve. Freebirds Lab is developing systematic, curriculum-embedded approaches to tracking and cultivating emotional quotient — frameworks a teacher can apply on a Tuesday morning, and evidence a school can act on.
To make this real at scale, we are partnering with LMS developers to build modern instruments that capture holistic growth: tools that record not only what a student knows, but how they collaborate, recover from failure, regulate frustration, and grow in self-awareness over time. Learning platforms already track marks with great precision. We want them to track the child with the same seriousness.
Where This Leads
We imagine a network of teacher-researchers across Delhi NCR whose classrooms double as sites of inquiry. We imagine published work that other educators actually read and use. We imagine schools that can speak about emotional development with data rather than aspiration. And we imagine teachers who are recognized as the researchers they have always been.
The name is deliberate. Freebirds Lab exists so that teachers are not confined to the syllabus handed to them — so they can question it, redesign it, test the redesign, and share what they find.
We are just starting. We would like you to start with us.