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Nagarjuna G.

Former Professor, HBCSE-TIFR | Visiting Faculty, IISER Pune | Principal Investigator, Gnowledge Lab

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Nagarjuna G.

About

Nagarjuna G. is the principal investigator of the Gnowledge Lab. He is a Former Professor at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE), TIFR, Mumbai, and is currently a Visiting Faculty at IISER Pune.

His work sits at the intersection of cognitive science, science education, semantic computing, and the free software / knowledge commons movement. He founded the Gnowledge Lab as a space for designing and developing discourse-based, collaborative, constructionist learning environments — what the lab calls studios — and for building the open-source infrastructure that supports them. The unusual spelling gnowledge is an homage to the GNU project, reflecting the lab’s commitment to free software and openly licensed knowledge.

Over two decades, his research has explored the biological and cognitive roots of knowledge, the structure and growth of concepts, and how technology can make learning visible and participatory. His longest-running technical project, GNOWSYS, is a graph-based framework for semantic computing that powers several of the lab’s platforms.

What I am doing currently

  • Sensation Modulating Network — research articles and a monograph on the SMN account of cognition, where haltable action patterns ground syntax and conscious action. Preprint (arXiv v2) · SMN-lab
  • Trust Conditions — a philosophy-of-science thread on objectivity as calibrated trust in instruments, media and institutions. Preprint (PhilSci-Archive) · DOI
  • Teaching at IISER Pune — a course on the cognitive science of science, serialized as the Roots of STEM essays on Substack, and a course on Philosophy of Science.
  • naYana — a phonetic alphabet and font for all the world’s writing systems, now with a web app to learn, type, read and listen. Try it · essay
  • nodeBook — building knowledge graphs in collaborative markdown. Try it · code
  • Cultivating STEM Habits — several popular talks for science and math teachers on scientific temper as a set of learnable habits (recording, drawing, visualizing, building, sharing). Slides from Eklavya, Bhopal (2026)
  • Living Academy — a “life-long kindergarten” studio and club-house for children and home-schooling parents in Pune.

Research interests

Projects

Projects led, co-led, or with significant authorship:

For ongoing research threads — including biological roots of knowledge, social cognition, shared memory space, and knowledge networks as complex systems — see the Research Projects page.

Software

Code repositories maintained by Nagarjuna G.:

Writing

Recent essays and longer-form pieces beyond the peer-reviewed list below:

Talks

Publications

Selected work spans concept mapping (2004–2016), GNOWSYS and semantic computing (2005–2014), cognitive ontogeny and the biological roots of knowledge (2005–2014), free-software and education policy (2008–2018), and recent collaborations on classroom learning and shared-screen environments (2017–2023). The full lab list is on the publications page.

Elsewhere on the web

Contact

To collaborate with the lab community, the recommended channel is metaStudio.org.