Hi, I'm Iti Bhargava.
I study how mental health shapes team performance. And I'm using these research insights to build tools teams can use.
Founder, Signal Studio · Bangalore
The backstory
I study how mental health shapes team performance. And I'm using these research insights to build tools teams can use.
Founder, Signal Studio · Bangalore
I trained as an economist. I didn't set out to work in mental health — I just kept following questions that led me here.
I studied economics at Yale and spent four years doing field research with J-PAL South Asia — MIT's Poverty Action Lab — running randomized evaluations in education, gender, and labour markets. The thing that stuck with me from that work was a pretty simple question: did this actually change anything, or did people just say it did?
I kept noticing a gap between what the research said should work and what actually happened inside organisations.
As Head of Research at Sukoon Health, I spent time understanding what the research literature gets right — and what breaks down when you try to apply it at work, where people spend most of their waking hours.
I didn't have a grand theory at that point. I just kept seeing the same pattern: organisations investing in mental health programs that felt good but didn't seem to change how teams actually functioned. It made me want to understand what was really going on.
It's starting to look like the problem was never stress itself — it's what stress does to how people see themselves at work.
I've been working with Dr. Nachiket Mor — a PhD economist and visiting scientist at the Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health — and we've collected primary data from 1,200+ employees across India.
What's emerging: when people lose their sense of capability (can I do this?), clarity (do I know what's expected?), or worth (does my contribution matter?) — that's when execution breaks down. Presenteeism, quiet quitting, attrition. These seem to happen when stress erodes how people think about themselves at work — not just because the stress exists.
We're still testing this. But the early evidence is pointing somewhere useful.
I wanted to see if the research could become something a team actually uses — so I started building it.
Signal Studio is a research-to-practice firm. We're building structured interventions for teams — mapped to capability, clarity, and worth — and trying to measure whether they show up in how people actually work.
If you're a founder or a CEO thinking about high-performance culture and what it takes to sustain it, signalstudio.in is where you'll find the details.
This page is just me telling you how I got here.
If any of this resonates with you, I'd like to talk.