Raja Karthikeya Gundu, graduated from MSFS in 2009 as a Scott B. Morse scholar. At Georgetown, he strove to bring students from different graduate disciplines together, and founded SECFOR- the first inter-faculty student forum on international security. He was a Harold Rosenthal Fellow in the US House of Representatives, a Junior Fellow in Diplomacy at Georgetown's Institute for Study of Diplomacy. and a Nuclear Policy scholar at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Most recently, he was a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University's Centre for the Changing Character of War.

His career has been driven by a desire to realise a world where pluralism thrives and in which there is equality of opportunity for all. As a Political Affairs Officer in the United Nations, he facilitated political dialogue, inter-ethnic trust-building and peace & reintegration processes in Afghanistan and managed grassroots efforts to protect civilians in the context of the counter-ISIS operations in Iraq. He led the UN's Global Programme to support governments to develop inclusive and human-rights sensitive policies to Prevent Violent Extremism. He currently works on the Policy Planning team for UN Peacekeeping operations.

A firm believer in Leadership with empathy, he founded "Project Madad" - a group of doctors and professionals that used a series of innovations to create the first COVID-resilient village in India during the Delta wave in 2021. He conceptualized and rolled out the first ever real-time map of hospital beds for public health emergencies in the country. In a bid to raise awareness about the impact of Climate Change on farmers and the need for Climate Adaptation, he crossed the Arctic and Antarctic circles in 2017-18. In 2004, as the lone civilian rescue volunteer on the ground, he played a critical role during the post-tsunami rescue operations in the Andaman & Nicobar islands. Earlier in 2001, following the devastating earthquake in western India, he was instrumental in the rescue of three survivors. He has received commendations and recognition from the Government of India and the Government of Switzerland for his rescue work and was named a Person of the Year by India's leading newsmagazine. In a bid to raise funds for drought relief, he jointly set a world-record in public-speaking while still in college.

He has worked determinedly to promote inclusion in the international civil service. He has been a penholder for the UN Secretary-General's Strategic Action Plan to address Racism and played an active role in UN reform efforts to improve equity, diversity and inclusion. A believer in bottom-up change, he has been twice nominated for the Secretary-General's Award. He speaks eight languages and is the author of an anthology of poetry in English, French and Telugu.
His work and writing has been featured in the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation's UN Leadership Report, Foreign Policy, National Interest, The Washington Post, BBC, OpenDemocracy among others.