Dr JC Niala is Deputy Director and Head of Research, Teaching and Collections at the History of Science Museum, University of Oxford, and Principal Investigator of Colonial Standards.
Her research explores how knowledge is produced, shared and contested, with a particular interest in the role that museums, collections and communities play in shaping historical understanding. She works extensively with collaborative and community-based research methodologies, bringing together objects, archives, oral histories and contemporary perspectives to investigate how knowledge travels across time and place.

Colonial Standards provided an opportunity to bring together long-standing interests in anthropology, social history and the history of science through the study of measurement and standardisation. By combining ethnographic approaches with collections-based and archival research, the project explores how standards are created, negotiated and experienced in everyday life.

Her work is highly collaborative and international, often connecting researchers, practitioners, collections and communities across institutional and national boundaries. Through Colonial Standards, she is particularly interested in how partnerships between India and the United Kingdom can generate new approaches to researching cultural heritage, scientific instruments and the social histories of knowledge.