Dr Achala Gupta is an Associate Professor of Sociology of Education at the Education School of the Faculty of Social Sciences in the University of Southampton, UK. 

Dr Gupta won the prestigious Hans L. Zetterberg Prize in Sociology (Uppsala University, Sweden) in 2025 for her contributions to the field. She has also won the internationally significant Professor M.N. Srinivas Memorial Prize at the 50th conference of the Indian Sociological Society (news reporting), 2024 Comparative and International Education Society Higher Education Special Interest Group (CIES-HE SIG) Best Book Award, and was shortlisted for the 2020 British Journal of Sociology of Education Best Early Career Article for her published works. 

She is Co-convenor of the Education Study Group of the British Sociological Association (BSA) and a member of the editorial advisory board of the British Journal of Sociology of Education. Previously, she served as an editorial board member of the British Sociological Association's flagship journal, Sociology. At the University of Southampton, Achala serves as Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Inclusion (since 2024) and Director of Internationalisation (Research) of the Education School (since 2025). She has led key roles such as Programme coordinator of the Education School Research Seminar Series (2023-25) and Faculty Ethics Reviewer (2021-24) since joining Southampton in 2021.

Dr Gupta's research focuses on investigating educational issues sociologically. Her published work explores practices and processes involving education delivery systems (formal and shadow) and how higher education students are socially constructed. She has explored various topics (e.g., global shadow education, higher education, GenAI, student and teacher identity, and parental involvement) and concepts (e.g., policy enactment, Bourdieusian theory of practice) in a variety of educational contexts in Asia and Europe: China, Denmark, England, Germany, India, Ireland, Poland, and Spain.