Media Mentions
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News & Insights
Latest updates, press coverage, and research highlights.
Research grant on AI-assisted farming in emerging markets_PEDL PhD Award
Soniya Gupta-Rawal, a PhD candidate at Cambridge Judge Business School, has been awarded a prestigious PEDL PhD Grant of £25,000 for her PhD research project under a special exploratory research grant (ERG) programme from the organisations Private Enterprise Development in Low Income Countries and the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Only 12 projects have been funded under this special call.
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Soniya's story at Emmanuel College: Empowering communities through research
Soniya’s research for her Marketing PhD examines how women entrepreneurs in developing markets are transforming their communities through small‑scale business innovation.
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ISBM 2025 Doctoral Award & Doctoral Fellow ~$5,000
The Penn State University, Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM) has named, Soniya Gupta-Rawal as the "ISBM Business Marketing Doctoral Fellow" based on the PhD research titled, "Governing B2B Knowledge Marketplaces: Matching Frictions, Fit, and Engagement on a Global Mentoring Platform", as the Winner of 2025 Doctoral Support Award Competition, Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM); $5,000.
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Changing Entrepreneurs’ Lives Through the Power of Human Connection
Contributed to MicroMentor’s 2025 impact evaluation by analysing mentorship outcomes, business performance, and social returns. The research found that mentored entrepreneurs were more likely to grow revenue by 2.1 times, strengthen leadership, acquire customers, and sustain their businesses. It also estimated $4.01 in additional business revenue for every $1 invested in mentorship.
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Award-Winning Research: Digital Leapfrogging to Advance Sustainability on Indian Farms
In this interview, Soniya Gupta-Rawal describes her award-winning research, including her research questions, methods, and key findings. She also shares what motivates her to do this important work.
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Thriving and Creating Impact During Your PhD: Tips from Award-Winning Scholars
Dr. Soniya Gupta-Rawal, doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, won the NBS Best Paper Award. The award recognizes a paper with rigorous research methods and high quality writing, which also has strong potential to impact theory or practice.
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India needs to change how it spends on social sector. Fund outcomes instead
India's Union Budget's record health and education allocations are insufficient, creating a widening social sector funding gap. The article advocates for outcome-based financing (impact investment), where private capital bears delivery risk, and the government pays only for verified results. While successful globally and in Indian pilots, scaling this critical approach faces government reluctance, regulatory, measurement, and capital distribution barriers.
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Research shows efficiency of India’s low-cost space missions
Recent missions by India’s space programme have shown that major milestones such as a 2023 soft Moon landing can be achieved on relatively modest budgets in the 10s of millions of dollars, says a just-published academic paper co-authored at Cambridge Judge Business School that demonstrates the scope of frugal innovation. For countries that have not ventured into space or fully reaped the benefits of space activity because they are held back by notions of extreme expense, these Indian examples chart a practical way forward.
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Enter if you dare: real-life research data horror stories for Data Horror week 2025!
As part of our activities to celebrate Data Horror Week 2025, we learn about real-life data horror stories from researchers at Cambridge. We describe how these were handled and how they could be prevented in the future. Soniya Gupta-Rawal, a PhD candidate in Quantitative Marketing at Cambridge Judge Business School and Data Champion. Her work uses field data partnerships across India, Egypt, and the UK. This is an applied session on data partnership horror stories and how to prevent them. Learn a practical checklist for scoping access, securing agreements, aligning Data Management Plans with contracts and ethics, and rescuing stalled collaborations. Three short case studies across sectors, with templates you can reuse.
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Emma Mildmay Award 2025 | Emmanuel College
Daniel McKay, Director of Emma Experience, sat down with Soniya Gupta-Rawal, PhD student, who has received the Mildmay Award 2025 to discuss the Emma Experience programme and the challenges and opportunities they face in their day-to-day lives.
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Why study for a PhD at Cambridge?
In the new film ‘Why study for a PhD?’, Soniya’s research tackles critical marketing challenges in emerging markets. Using field experiments, AI and economic analysis to study the impact of various marketing strategies, Soniya is identifying what works for micro-entrepreneurs in India and Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge Meets JBS Students
We were delighted to host a visit from Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge last Friday. It was so kind of her to visit. We showcased our research, our wonderful students and discussed interdisciplinary collaboration across the University too.
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Tony Cowling Grant Award 2023-27
In co-operation with the Cambridge Judge Business School, the Tony Cowling Memorial Research Fund awards Faculty and PhD students for advancing early-stage research on topics that improve decision-making in the market research industry. These subjects are selected by CJBS in accordance with principles agreed with the Foundation. In general, topics that have international relevance and that use innovative applications of technology and data.
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Data Champion | University of Cambridge
Soniya Gupta-Rawal is a Data Champion from Judge Business School. She is a PhD candidate in Quantitative Marketing at Cambridge Judge Business School and Data Champion. Her work uses field data partnerships across India, Egypt, Indonesia and many other emerging markets
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