Dr Nita Khandekar did her graduation in B.Sc(H.Sc) from G B Pant University, Pantnagar in the year 1984. She enrolled for her masters at the ICAR-Indian Veterinary Research Institute, Izatnagar and got her M.Sc (Extension Education) degree in 1988 where she continued for her doctorate in the same discipline and was awarded Ph.D in 1992. She is from the Agricultural Research Services and joined ICAR in 1992 in the discipline of Agricultural Extension. After completing her training she joined ICAR-Central Avian Research Institute, Izatnagar in 1993 where she worked till 2003 and thereon, shifted to ICAR-Indian Insitute of Horticultural Research, Bengaluru, from where she moved to ICAR-Indian Insitute of Soybean Resarch, Indore in June 2017.
Her areas of interest are gender studies, technology dissemination approaches and impact assessment. She has developed several extension models and scales with the most important one for rapid quality seed production in Soybean. She has published more than 50 research papers, twelve book chapers, co-edited 4 books, presented more than 100 invited/submitted papers in seminar symposium and has more than 500 popular/news articles to her credit. She has expentively made use of mass media for technological back-stopping. She has been actively involved in teaching at post-graduate level and has guided 3 Ph.D, 4 M.Sc and 2 student projects. She is recipient of Commonweatlth Academic Staff Fellowship (2009-10) tenable at the University of Reading, UK. She has been member of several committes of the Incidan council of Social Scisnces Research, University Grants Commissin, Department of Biotechnolgy and ICAR. She has won several awards and laurels incuding the Productivity council award and the Soybean Processors Association of India (SOPA) special award for significant contribution to Research and Development of soybean cultivation in India (2021)