India
Avantika Shrivastava is from India. She is 27 years old. She is a journalist by training, she started her career at Indian news agency PTI where she voluntarily reported on social issues that have an impact on the country apart from being an editor.
As her job responsibilities grew in recognition of her performance, she learnt a valuable lesson. She realised that public awareness was not an end in itself but was rather part of a larger and more significant process of knowledge creation, which drove social change. She then transitioned to MSF so as to be more involved in this transformation. She traveled to the Indian states of Bihar and Manipur to document the lives of people trapped in conditions of underdevelopment through human interest stories. She is a professional communicator with Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and more recently a Masters scholar at the University of Edinburgh.