Bhargav Bhat is the Data Director at Sangath, he works more specifically on the PRIDE Adolescents mental health program. He has been associated with Sangath since 2004; for the last 17 years, he has worked on 11 research and intervention projects in Child, Adolescent, and Youth mental health, Addictions, and Adult mental health at Sangath.

He has a double Masters; First in Economics from Goa University and MSc. In Public Health (Health Promotion) from LSHTM and has also completed PGDM’s in Human Resource Development and Family counselling. Additionally, he also has attended several short certificate courses in relevant social sector topics such as demographic, gender, reproductive health, addictions, mental health, research, data management & analysis, etc.

He is currently a member of the Senior Management Team (SMT) of the Sangath society and also holds the position of Principal Investigator, Senior Researcher & Data Manager for 3 different projects PRIDE.

His current project works with school-going adolescents and aims to develop and evaluate mental health and counselling intervention programs, which target multiple problems faced by students such as bullying, coercion, violence, substance use, anxiety, depression, etc. This counselling program is delivered by lay-health counselors by using youth-friendly tools such as comic books and mobile phone Apps.

He currently leads a team of 13 researchers and 5 data staff who work across projects and are based in Sangath’s Delhi and Goa offices. Till now, he has been a mentor to 23 Graduate and post-graduate research interns and guided them in various aspects of their research several of them have gone ahead to study further in various reputed institutes or joined Sangath as staff or other reputed NGOs, also 6 of them have gone ahead and applied for Grants, and one of them have started a Social Entrepreneurship website on Sex-ed and 3 of them have been shortlisted for project grants such as the ICG grant 2019. To date, he had 21 research publications in peer-reviewed journals and also 1 book chapter which are available to review online.

Additionally, he is the founder and Co-Director of Learn Tinkering Lab Data Consultancy PVT. LTD. And Twinkle Lab E-learning LLP, which he co-founded in 2019 with his Brother, and is currently having 3 offices in Goa, with its head office in Verna near CIBA Atal Incubation Centre.

He conducts several capacity building and training in schools and communities and also for the Sangath staff, his recent training have been on the following topics; Research methodology, Clinical Data Management & Analysis, Reproductive and sexual health, Fundraising, Grant Writing, Counseling Quality Assurance, etc. 

In his leisure time, he likes to watch movies, listen to music and write poetry.