Host Institution India: University of California

Vaishali Thakkur

Ms. Vaishali Thakkur is a Ph.D. scholar at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK), Uttar Pradesh. Her research focuses on modelling enzymatic reactions using density functional based on the quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) technique. As a part of her doctoral thesis, she works with the QM/MM method, along with various enhanced sampling techniques, to study the underlying mechanism for antibiotic resistance. She is also interested in identifying and addressing the bottleneck in these calculations to make them more efficient. Apart from science, she enjoys spending her time learning new languages and playing with her color palette.

Prior to joining IITK as a research scholar, she completed her bachelor’s and master’s in Chemistry from Delhi University and Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD), respectively. She has been a recipient of the merit cum means scholarship for her performance at IITD. She also has a year-long experience of working as an online educator and content reviewer at Chegg India Pvt. Ltd.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, she will work with experts to understand and implement a new electrostatic embedding scheme in the existing QM/MM framework. The aim is to develop a model that is accurate and affordable at the same time. The introduction of such a method would be beneficial for people modelling reactions in complex biological systems, where the computation of these electrostatic interactions proves to be time consuming.

Manashita Borah

Dr. Manashita Borah, is as an Assistant Professor (Senior Grade) in the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE), Tezpur University, Assam, India since 2016. She obtained her PhD from Department of EE, NIT Silchar. Dr Borah is the recipient of the Young Scientist Award, conferred by DST, Government of Assam in the State Awards Ceremony for Scientific Excellence in 2019, the Young Engineer’s Award by Senior Engineers Forum, Institution of Engineers in 2018 and two IEEE best paper awards. Additionally, she also received the Distinguished Anundoram Borooah Merit Award from the Government of Assam and Oil India Limited.

Dr Borah leads the Control System Design and Simulation Laboratory in the Department of EE at Tezpur University, where her research group is focusing on designing fractional-order controllers, IoT enabled renewable energy systems, among others.

Her Fulbright-Kalam project aims to address two open problems faced globally: shortcomings of existing energy infrastructure and climate sustainable energy storage by capitalizing on green energy sources. She will be working on designing a smart hybrid storage system to deliver an improved, sustainable, resilient, safe, and efficient green energy storage infrastructure. It will address the serious implications of climate change faced in her home state of Assam, such as heavy floods due to the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, soil erosion and landslides that cause power outage for several days.

Apart from being conferred with prestigious awards and having publications in reputed journals, she has been actively associated with various departmental, academic and co-curricular activities of the university, such as dance, drama, and yoga. She has been trained in the Indian classical dance forms of Bharatnatyam and Shattriya for twelve years.

Venugopal Vuruputur

Dr. Venugopal Vuruputur is presently a faculty member in the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (CAOS), Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. He has an M.S. and Ph.D. from University of Minnesota and a B.Tech. from IIT Madras, all in Civil Engineering (with specialization in Hydrology). Since joining CAOS, Dr. Vuruputur and his students have focused on characterizing the multiscale space-time structure of tropical rainfall and its variability. More recently, he has also been exploring hydrology-oriented problems, including estimation and simulation of surface and subsurface storage and their variability in the Ganges-Brahmaputra River system, coupled with analyzing geochemical markers upstream of the river to better characterize and understand landslide-triggered flash floods. He was an Associate Editor of Water Resources Research during the period 2013-2017 and has been on the review editorial board of Frontiers in Atmospheric Sciences since 2015. He has also been a member of national and regional committees related to cloud seeding experiments in India, and water resources management.

During his stint as a Fulbright-Kalam fellow at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), in collaboration with Prof. Jin-Yi Yu of the Department of Earth Science, Dr. Vuruputur proposes to identify and robustly characterize pathways from the midlatitudes that can potentially modulate the sub seasonal variability of the Indian monsoon, especially in the early and late phases of the season.

Chanchal Yadav

Ms. Chanchal Yadav, an Indian Administrative Service officer, belongs to the 2008 batch of the Arunachal, Goa, Mizoram, and Union Territories (AGMUT) cadre. A postgraduate in political science from the University of Delhi, she is known for her innovations in public service delivery systems. She has diverse experience working in various capacities in the Union Territory of Daman, the border state of Arunachal Pradesh, the capital city of Delhi and the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India.

As Secretary, New Delhi Municipal Council, she brought substantial improvement in civic services delivery, leveraging technology. She successfully steered the organization towards becoming the first municipal body in country to go cashless. Her concerted efforts towards the cleanliness of the city resulted in NDMC becoming the first Open Defecation Free (ODF) urban local body of Delhi; the organization continuously remained amongst the top cities in the Swachh Sarvekshans by the Government of India.

Under her leadership, the district administration of Changlang more than doubled its annual revenue collection, successfully rolled out livelihood missions and registered a steady decline in insurgency-related incidents. She was conferred the Governor’s Gold Medal for her meritorious public service. As Special Secretary to the Lieutenant Governor, Delhi, she effectively coordinated with agencies responsible for the civic administration of the capital and contributed to the drafting of Delhi’s Master Plan Document 2041.

Ms. Yadav is passionate about urban governance and as a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, she aims to gain specialization in the sector and orient her civil services career around it. She loves to be in nature and gardening is her favorite hobby.

Sadhana Naithani

Dr. Sadhana Naithani is a Professor at the Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. She is the Coordinator of the Folklore Unit at JNU, an Honorary Fellow of the American Folklore Society, and the current President of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research.

She did her Ph.D. in the field of German Folkloristics. She has been interested in the transformation of the concept of folklore in different historical contexts-under British colonialism, in Germany after World War II, and in the Baltic countries under Soviet occupation. She is the author of In Quest of Indian Folktales (Indiana University Press, 2006), The Story Time of the British Empire (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), Folklore Theory in Post-war Germany (University Press of Mississippi, 2014) and Folklore in Baltic History, Resistance and Resurgence (University Press of Mississippi, 2019). Her novella: Elephantine (Red Squirrel Press, 2016) is based on her research in colonial forestry led by German scientists in British India. She is on the editorial boards of journals Marvels and Tales, Cultural Analysis, and Journal of the School of Languages.

Dr. Naithani is deeply interested in the relationship of human and non-human beings experienced in cultural-political contexts and expressed in narratives. As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar at University of California, Berkeley, she will explore the narratives of British colonizers about the wild non-human animals of the colonies. She will teach a graduate course in the Fall Semester and an undergraduate course in the Spring Semester around her research theme.

Basavaprabhu L. Patil

Dr. Basavaprabhu L. Patil is a Principal Scientist (Plant Biotechnology) at ICAR-Indian Institute of Horticultural Research (IIHR), Bengaluru. He did Bachelor’s of Science and Master’s of Science in Agriculture from UAS-Dharwad and Ph.D. (2001-2005) from University of Delhi. During Ph.D. he received a DAAD scholarship to work at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He did his postdoctoral research (2006-2010) in Danforth Plant Science Center, St. Louis, USA and contributed to the development of Virus Resistant Cassava for Africa. Briefly he worked as Scientist-D, in the DBT’s National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute, Mohali and then he relocated to University of Basel, Switzerland. In 2012, he joined as a Senior Scientist in ICAR-National Institute for Plant Biotechnology, New Delhi. In 2018, he relocated to ICAR-IIHR, Bengaluru and continues to work in the area of Plant Virology. During his stint in ICAR, he has been PI for multiple projects funded by DBT, BIRAC, BCIL and ICAR. He has published extensively and is a recognized editor for International Journals, and reviewer for Grant Applications. He has served as an external expert to assess the scientists from CSIR and ICAR. He was honored with the IVS Fellow Award by the Indian Virological Society in 2014 and received EU’s Erasmus Mundus scholarship in 2016. Recently, he was conferred with Prof. B.M. Johri memorial Award, by the Society for Plant Research (India).

During his Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship at the University of California, Davis, Dr. Patil will develop and validate novel Genome Editing Tools for Virus Diagnostics, Functional Genomics and Virus Control.

Ranjith Padinhateeri

Dr. Ranjith Padinhateeri is a professor in the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay). Dr. Padinhateeri’s lab focuses on theoretical studies to understand various biological phenomena using a variety of tools from physics, including statistical mechanics, polymer physics, and soft-matter theory. His specific areas of interest include nucleosome dynamics, chromatin assembly, DNA mechanics, and the self-assembly of proteins.

Dr. Padinhateeri completed his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, and the Institute Curie, Paris. He gained expertise in applying physics principles to understand biological systems. Dr. Padinhateeri joined the IIT Bombay faculty in 2009. He and his team developed computational models to investigate the kinetics of nucleosomes and the polymer organization of chromatin. Dr. Padinhateeri has received several awards, including the National Bioscience Award from the Department of Biotechnology India.

Dr. Padinhateeri’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to develop a model to understand chromatin organization —the organization of the genetic material— in space and time inside a cell nucleus, accounting for nucleosome dynamics. The predictions from computational studies of the model could help us to design gene regions that can have specific chromatin states. As a part of the fellowship, Dr. Padinhateeri also plans to teach a course on modeling biological processes covering stochastic processes, Monte Carlo simulations, and molecular dynamics simulations.

Ria Sen Gupta

Ms. Ria Sen Gupta is a Ph.D. candidate and a Prime Minister’s Research Fellow at the Department of Materials Engineering, IISc Bangalore. She is advised by Prof. Suryasarathi Bose. Her research interests span all aspects of structure-property relationships in polymer nanocomposites. A general theme underlying her current research projects is the engineering of bioinspired membranes for water remediation from interpenetrating polymeric networks (IPNs). She is also broadly interested in water remediation, polymer nanocomposites, and EMI shielding materials. Her research has appeared in several reputed international journals. She has also delivered talks and presentations at various national and international conferences, workshops, and forums.

Before joining IISc, Ms. Sen Gupta completed her M.Tech. and post-B.Sc three-year B.Tech. in polymer science and technology at the University of Calcutta, and her B.Sc. (Hons.) in chemistry at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata. In her free time, she loves singing, cooking, reading books, painting, and watching movies.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Sen Gupta is exploring antifouling MXene composite membranes with photocatalytic self-cleaning abilities for synergistically enhanced water treatment. In particular, she is leveraging “photocatalysis” and “membrane separation” technologies to design and fabricate broad-spectrum multifunctional membranes with improved antifouling attributes and superior membrane performance. She is synthesizing composite membranes endowed with self-cleaning and antifouling features using photocatalytic two-dimensional (2D) etched metal carbides (MXene) heterostructures. She aims to ensure that the membranes can liquidate the inhomogeneity and impaired compatibility between photocatalytic nanoparticles and the 2D heterostructures membrane-based separation layer for cost-effective membrane performance and improved shelf-life.

Sana Imtiazbhai Jindani

Ms. Sana Imtiazbhai Jindani is a Senior Research Fellow at CSIR-Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute (CSIR-CSMCRI), Bhavnagar, Gujarat. The focus of her doctoral research encompasses theoretical understanding of stereo-electronic interactions and their role in an interplay between structure and reactivity of organic- and bio-molecules. She combines a variety of computational tools to gain a full understanding of these subtle but decisive interactions. Apart from her thesis work, she enjoys collaboration and has published collaborative work in peer-reviewed international journals.

Ms. Jindani graduated in inorganic chemistry from The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Gujarat. As a part of her M.Sc. dissertation, she focused on developing ruthenium complexes as DNA binders. Before joining her Ph.D., she worked as Assistant Professor at C U Shah University, Gujarat, where she delivered lectures to B.S. and M.S. students on topics in inorganic chemistry.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Jindani is working on overcoming the reactivity/stability trade-offs of click reagents for biorthogonal reactions through strain reinforcement and stereo-electronic stabilization. These biorthogonal reactions will be utilized for bio-molecular labelling without interfering with natural biological processes. In addition to her research work, Ms. Jindani hopes to encourage and promote Indian traditional yoga practices at her host institution for an active and healthy lifestyle.

Utpalendu Haldar

Mr. Utpalendu Haldar earned his bachelor’s and master’s in geology from Jadavpur University and subsequently started his career as a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is working under the supervision of Prof. Ramananda Chakrabarti and is exploring the chemical evolution of earth’s continental crust. Towards this end, he has been using novel isotopic tracers on unique archives, such as komatiites, loess and glacial diamictites. He has been working in collaborations with both national and foreign universities during his tenure as a doctoral candidate.

Mr. Haldar is enthusiastic towards promoting science in all sections of society and dedicates his leisure time towards this goal. He firmly believes that co-curricular activities help nurture the best in us and has represented IISc in cricket in multiple national events. Thus, he considers the Fulbright-Nehru fellowship an opportunity to learn about and cherish the culture of the American west coast.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Mr. Haldar is working to enhance the understanding of crust-mantle interaction and magma chamber processes. He is investigating fluid inclusions in basalts from the Deccan Volcanic Province (DVP) to further his doctoral work.