Dr. Celia S. Chari is the MCH-Dogra Art Foundation Conservation Scientist and a research Associate of the Mittal Institute for the MCH project. She travels to museums across DC and NYC to analyze artworks for the MCH database, supporting ongoing art historical and scientific research on South Asian painting practices and artists’ materials. Previously, she was the Beal Family Postdoctoral Fellow in conservation science at the Harvard Art Museums. Her past and ongoing work with MCH includes analyzing traditional plant- and mineral-based South Asian pigments; studying the light-induced alteration mechanisms of Indian arsenic sulfide pigments; developing non-invasive, reflectance FTIR tools for the analysis of 16th–18th century Indian manuscripts; and, reuniting the Dispersed Bhagavata Purana through materials analysis. She holds a Ph.D. in materials science from Caltech and has collaborated with several institutions on the scientific study of artists materials, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ENS Paris-Saclay, MIT, and Synchrotron SOLEIL.
Visit Celia’s website here.
Publications:
Patil, V., Chari, C.S., Eremin, K. et al. Inside a sixteenth-century Indian artists’ workshop: technical and scientific insights into the Dispersed Bhagavata Purana. npj Herit. Sci. 14, 327 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s40494-026-02491-x
Chari, C.S., Eremin, K., Jain, A. et al. Characterization of Indian pigments: investigating the color palette of a traditional Jaipuri workshop. npj Herit. Sci. 13, 193 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s40494-025-01729-4
