FOLK Research Team

Meet the Team

The architects, statisticians, and AI engineers behind FOLK Cultural Intelligence.

Dr. Aruni Ghosh

The Conceptual Architect

Aruni brings together consumer insight, culture, behavioural science and analytics. His career spans Nielsen and senior regional/global Consumer Insights & Analytics leadership at Philip Morris International, before moving into innovation at SixthFactor Consulting. He holds a PhD in Marketing from IIM Kashipur.

FOLK Contribution:Conceptualized the FOLK framework—shaping the underlying cultural questions, dimensions, and qualitative interpretations that the statistical and AI layers make measurable and scalable.

Pranav Krishna

The Statistical Backbone

Pranav brings mathematical discipline to ideas about culture. An ISI mathematics graduate and EPFL-trained statistician, his background ranges from statistical modelling and climate extremes to time-series forecasting, Monte Carlo simulation, and Marketing Mix Modelling. He serves as Head Statistician at Sapien+AI.

FOLK Contribution:Turned the conceptual framework into an empirically defensible model—leading the factor analysis, measurement relationships, MICE imputation, and statistical validation.

Shubhankar Kumar

The AI Builder

Shubhankar works where AI stops being a model and starts becoming a system. An AI Research Engineer at Sapien+AI with a foundation in Mathematics and Scientific Computing, his work spans agentic AI, multi-agent decision systems, knowledge graphs, and adaptive optimization under uncertainty.

FOLK Contribution:Built the AI layer—translating the framework and its statistical foundations into agentic computational systems capable of interpreting, deliberating, and scaling cultural intelligence globally.