Frankel has joined the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington, DC, as a senior fellow.
Kapur, 47, recently moved to Philadelphia and joined the University of Pennsylvania as an associate professor of political science and to hold the Madan Lal Sobti Professorship for the Study of Contemporary India from the University of Texas at Austin where he was associate professor of government and Asian studies.
Before his one-year stint at the University of Texas, Kapur - from 1997 to 2005 - was on the faculty at Harvard - first as an assistant and then associate professor. The year before he went to Austin, was the Frederick Danziger associate professor of government at Harvard.
In an interview with Rediff India Abroad, Kapur acknowledged he was "absolutely thrilled" to take over as CASI director "because it's the right time with all of what's going on in India and also in terms of US-India relations."
He said he was "looking forward" to his new avatar and the many challenges, least of all raising adequate funding for the Centre, which is independent of the University of Pennsylvania.
Kapur said the Madan Lal Sobti Professorship for the Study of Contemporary India "is attached to the person who is the director of the Centre."
He noted that "when CASI was established in 1992 by Francine, there was very little interest in India and it was a struggle in the 1990s, but in the last four, five years it has come into its own."
Kapur, who was born in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, but was raised in Kolkata before he came to the US in 1983, said, "Essentially, my goal is to build on the foundation which she (Frankel) laid."
He said his top priority would be "to build CASI to sort of focus on policy relevant issues, but particularly those that are long-term, because the short-term is something that the think tanks do they can do it well."
He said he believed that being at a university "gives you the luxury to think of long-term issues like India's institutions or environmental matters."
However, Kapur said, while CASI would continue to sustain its programmes and events, he planned to link it more closely with the university, both academically and in terms of policy studies.
Over the years, Kapur's research has focused largely on human capital, national and public institutions, and the ways in which local-global linkages affect political and economic change in developing countries, in particular on India, and the impact of international institutions and diasporas on India.
Currently, he is completing a book under contract with the Princeton University Press titled, Democracy, Death and Diamonds: The Impact of Migration from India on India.
Kapur has published extensively and authored or co-authored Give Us Your Best and Brightest: The Global Hunt for Talent and its Impact on the Developing World (Centre for Global Development, 2006); Public Institutions in India: Performance and Design (Oxford University Press, 2005); and a seminal study following six-and-a-half years of painstaking research at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC titled The World Bank: Its First Half Century (Brookings Institution Press, 1997).
He is an alumnus of the Banaras Hindu University's Institute of Technology from where he received his BTech in chemical engineering in 1983, and the University of Minnesota from where he received his master of science degree also in chemical engineering in 1985. In 1994, the Woodrow Wilson Centre of Princeton University conferred him with a a PhD in public policy. In 2005, he received the Joseph R Levenson Teaching Prize at Harvard.
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