Madhulika is a Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Delhi, where, in 1996, she obtained her PhD with her thesis Power, Culture, Medicine: Ayurvedic Pharmaceuticals in India. Madhulika has a strong research interest in the politics of knowledge and its role in shaping the discourse and practice of development, with a particular focus on the Global South. She is currently working on a manuscript with the title “Politics of Knowledge in Development: An Analytical Framework”. She has authored various publications in peer-reviewed journals and edited books, and has also participated in the research project PHARMASUD: Innovating from the South: Production, invention, and appropriation of pharmaceutical knowledge in Brazil and India, which was born from a collaboration between French, Brazilian, and Indian scholars. She was invited to be a member of the Advisory Committee of the NGO Dastkar Andhra, a member of the Review Committee for the NGO Seva Mandir, a Life Member of the Indian Institute of Public Administration, and an honorary Fellow of the Developing Countries Research Centre. She has also been a visiting researcher both at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London.

At THE NEW INSTITUTE Madhulika was involved in the program The Future of Democracy.