About Us

Meet the Team

We have 40+ Applied Behavioural Science Consultants at Cowry who have academic and research backgrounds from Leeds Business School, Penn State University, Cornell, LSE, UCL, Warwick, Bath, Stirling, Kingston, City University, Durham and who are led by two experienced leaders in the Civic Sector.


  • Ruth Canagarajah is an applied behavioural scientist who has worked globally in the development and public sectors. Skilled in business development, end-to-end project management and experimental design, she spent 6 years in East Africa, applying behavioural insights to socially complex spaces governance challenges such as corruption, crime, and gender-based violence.

    Her work has spanned creating a live evaluation of volunteer-driven crowdsourcing of online misinformation with the UNDP; designing a diff-in-diff communications intervention on bribery with small-scale traders between Kenya-Uganda and Kenya-Tanzania borders; using Natural Language Processing to shape a targeted campaign for a legal women's advocacy group by better understanding how parliament members spoke about key pro-women's rights bills; and helping build the behavioural and evaluation capacities with multiple civil society organisations. More recently, she worked on optimising content moderation for Meta.

  • Si is a behavioural scientist and cognitive psychologist with 10-plus years of experience spanning the academic, public, and private sectors. After his PhD, Si spent six years working at Leeds University Business School, before joining the Behavioural Insights Team in Westminster for three years applying behavioural science to public policy. Most recently Si has been Manager at Cowry Consulting.

    Across his career to date, Si's work has been published as academic articles in journals, white paper reports, and policy papers, helping clients such as major financial firms (Grant Thornton, HSBC UK, Monzo, AON; ClearScore); third-sector charities (Citizens Advice; PayPlan); and government departments (DCMS, DHSC, PHE).

    In 2023 Simon was made an Honorary Reader in the Politics Department at the University of Manchester."

Cowry Civic Solutions is a division of Cowry Consulting (one of the world’s leading behavioural science consultancies), that delivers impact within our societies and communities. The highly skilled team specialises in delivering programmes that impact positively on societal issues such as health, financial inclusion, sustainability and climate change.

Our work in the UK covers areas such as child safety, diabetes prevention, adherence to alcohol and addiction programmes, work rehabilitation and helping to relaunch 100,000 careers in government programmes for those who lost their jobs in the pandemic. 

We’ve helped charities such as Dandelion Time, a nature-based charity that gives early support to children who’ve suffered from traumatic experiences such as domestic abuse and neglect. We’re also supporting the Feeding Your Kids Foundation, which operates an international program to teach parents how to feed their children healthier and to have a healthier attitude toward food. Developed as a commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative, the Feeding Your Kids program is entirely free to parents worldwide. Our work with The Dogs Trust will help families create forever homes through expert advice and training programmes for new dog owners. 

Globally, we’re helping people fly more sustainably on airlines with easyJet and helping the Asian Development Bank provide its member countries in Asia and the Pacific with the knowledge and expertise to tackle problems such as climate change, water security, inequality and poverty.