India Fellows Years: Indian Fellows 2023-2024

Aiman Wahab

Ms. Aiman Wahab is an English language teacher at Jamia Middle School. She completed her postgraduation in English literature from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi in 2022. She worked as Digital Academician at Bloombrain Learning Solutions. As a mentor at Bloombrain, she provided spoken English classes to adults and enabled them to cultivate their soft skills, ace their job interviews, and achieve proficiency in the English language.

Ms. Wahab is a poetry enthusiast and has a passion for teaching language using learner-centric methods. Her poetry and articles have been published in journals, online magazines, and anthologies. Her zealous participation in slam poetry, nukkad naatak, and qawwali performances during her graduation has enabled her to use these as pedagogical tools in her classroom and to create a vibrant learning experience for her students.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Ms. Wahab intends to create cultural awareness about India’s rich heritage and employ interactive methods to introduce Hindi language and literature to her students. She looks forward to exploring new techniques of teaching foreign languages through her experience in the U.S.

Disha Wadekar

Ms. Disha Wadekar is an independent advocate practicing before the Supreme Court of India and various High Courts in India. Her practice focuses on representing marginalized communities on matters pertaining to constitutional law and anti-discrimination law. She has worked on many constitution bench matters, including the famous Sabarimala temple entry case and the economically weaker section (EWS) reservation case. In 2022, she was appointed the Assistant Special Public Prosecutor by the Government of Rajasthan.

An engineer-turned-lawyer, Ms. Wadekar completed her undergraduate law degree from Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU), Pune. She has taught courses on law and marginalization at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, and National Law University, Delhi, and has delivered lectures at various institutions. She is also a member of the academic committee on Denotified Tribes at SPPU, Pune, and of the research ethics committee at the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies (IIDS), Delhi.

In 2021, Ms. Wadekar co-founded Community for the Eradication of Discrimination in Education and Employment (CEDE)—an organization working towards a diverse and inclusive Indian legal profession and the judiciary. She has also provided consultancy to organizations, such as the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, Delhi. Her work has been published by reputed journals and online portals.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellowship, Ms. Wadekar is pursuing LLM from Columbia University. She hopes to learn about the feminist, indigenous, and critical race critiques of the justice system. She believes her fellowship will enable her to contribute to litigation, research, and advocacy interventions that foreground rights-based anti-caste and intersectional perspectives in the Indian justice system.

Vidya Viswanathan

Ms. Vidya Viswanathan is an environmental policy researcher. She consults with multiple state agencies and NGOs as a domain expert. Currently, she is working with Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research (SAFAR) leading their national initiative of building accountability and transparency for common resource governance. In the past, she led the Environmental Justice Program at the Center for Policy Research (CPR), a leading policy think tank in Delhi. Ms. Viswanathan was CPR’s youngest Program Director. Under her leadership, the program restored common resources through improved regulatory compliance, thereby protecting farmlands and water bodies from industrial contamination in over 150 energy and infrastructure projects. She has also worked with the government through her engagement with the Ministries of Labor and Employment and of Rural Development.

Ms. Viswanathan is the co-author of several articles and papers that discuss the efficacy of environmental regulations in protecting ecology and managing social conflicts induced by land use changes on the ground. Her research interests include methods of strengthening environmental governance, including regulations, with a focus on building better and collaborative interfaces between citizens and regulators to promote India’s ecological security.

Ms. Viswanathan graduated top of her class and received numerous awards for her academic and non-academic achievements at the postgraduate level. She holds a Master of Arts in social work with a specialization in community organization and development practice from the prestigious Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and a bachelor’s in economics from the University of Delhi.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Ms. Viswanathan aims to acquire specialized skills in policymaking and soft skills of leadership and advocacy. She is excited about experiential learning from a diverse and accomplished cohort that will help her refine the pathways of documenting, articulating, and building compelling insights from the grassroots into environmental policy design.

Pavithra Venkataraman

Ms. Pavithra Venkataraman is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai. Her research is in the area of evolutionary biology. Specifically, she uses experimental methods to understand the evolution of proteins, and theoretical methods to understand the evolution of metabolic cooperation and sympatric speciation in a population.

Ms. Venkataraman completed her bachelor’s in chemical engineering from M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bengaluru. In 2020, she was awarded the Best Outgoing Chemical Engineering Student by the Bangalore Chapter of the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers. She enjoys exploring new places, cuisines and cultures. She also likes learning new languages.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, she will work with Prof. Sergey Kryazhimskiy to characterize the variation in the local structure of fitness landscapes to assess the predictability of evolution. This work is important to build our understanding of the process of evolution as a whole and has implications for pathogen evolution and human health.

Divya Swaminathan

Ms. Divya Swaminathan is a Ph.D. scholar at the Infant – Toddler Language Development and Intervention Lab, Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru. Before joining NIMHANS for her Ph.D., Ms. Swaminathan worked at the St. John’s National Academy of Health Sciences, Bengaluru, where she worked on developing an early screening tool for identifying increased likelihood for autism (HL-ASD) in infants between 9-18 months. She is a passionate clinician – researcher with expertise in detection of and intervention for autism.

Ms. Swaminathan’s current area of research focuses on early caregiver speech (CGS) and its impact on the development of communication and language skills in infants at HL-ASD. She is using automatic speech recognition (ASR) models to evaluate early CGS.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Swaminathan has joined Dr. Marisa Casillas’s lab. Ms. Swaminathan is working on improving existing ASR models that are sensitive to a multilingual setup. More accurate ASR models will help automatize amount of CGS that otherwise require laborious hand annotation

Devika Singh Shekhawat

Ms. Devika Singh Shekhawat is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi. She has a master’s in sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research interests lies at the intersection of gender and labor studies, public health, migration studies, and developmental issues.

Ms. Shekhawat is a writer, educator and research scholar. She has written on the history and memory of migration of tea plantation workers of Assam for Zubaan Publication and co-authored a book chapter with the Programme of Social Actions – The Research Collective on the Ecological Crisis of Shrimp Aquaculture and discourses of migration and infiltration in Coastal Odisha. She has been a part of multiple projects that study rural public healthcare infrastructure, ecological conservation and labor relations in northeast India. Her research on the work of ASHA workers in tea plantations during the pandemic has been published as a book chapter with Northeast Social Research Centre and Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group.

Her Ph.D. research project explores the relationship between health and labor that manifests itself in the body of the worker and their everyday life. She engages with the nature of work, the production process that affects the health of the worker and the conditions for ailments and disease created for the worker in the tea plantations of Assam. Through a study of labor relations and structural conditions of work, her research attempts to explore how health and labor operate in tea plantations.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Shekhawat is working with Dr. Sarah Besky at the South Asia Program at Cornell University to carry forward her Ph.D. research work. She is focusing on how conditions of structural reproduction of ill-health are produced and understood within the plantation economy.

Shruti Singh

Ms. Shruti Singh is a doctoral candidate at the Computer Science and Engineering department, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Her research interests lie in the field of natural language processing, specifically in learning representations of scientific articles. Her research goal is to develop tools that assist researchers at various stages of the research cycle and democratize the entry of marginalized communities into research.

Ms. Singh received her bachelor’s in information and communication technology with a minor in computational sciences from Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gujarat. Post her bachelor’s, she worked as a research engineer at Raxter and a product engineer at Sprinklr.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Singh is working with Prof. Arman Cohan at Yale University on learning aspect-based representations for scientific articles. Aspect-based representations of research articles will enable fine-grained scholarly search, increase the productivity of researchers, and expedite the process of knowledge discovery.

Ardhra Shylendran

Ms. Ardhra Shylendran is a Ph.D. candidate at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, Maharashtra. Her doctoral thesis focuses on molecular dynamics simulations and modeling of ion transport in the alkali metal ion rechargeable battery electrolytes. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed international journals and presented at national and international conferences.

Before joining IISER Pune as a research scholar, Ms. Shylendran completed her BS-MS dual degree in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. She was a recipient of the INSPIRE scholarship from the Government of India during her BS-MS. She has also been awarded INSPIRE fellowship for pursuing her Ph.D. at IISER Pune.

Apart from science, she is interested in various kinds of arts like painting, drawing, and calligraphy. She is a classical dancer, trained in Bharatnatyam, and also practices yoga and meditation. She enjoys spending time on the beach and in the mountains and trekking/hiking. She loves to travel and meet people of various cultures.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Shylendran is exploring the computational modeling of solid electrolyte interphases. She is primarily working on finding alternatives to conventional electrolytic solvents and predicting their physical, structural, and dynamic properties using the existing computational tools.

Joel P Joseph

Mr. Joel P Joseph is a Ph.D. candidate at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, Karnataka. His doctoral thesis aims to develop a 3D bioprinted T cell culture platform to screen for novel immunomodulatory compounds and validate them using an in vivo mouse model of an autoimmune disease.

Before starting his Ph.D., Mr. Joseph was Junior Research Fellow at Manipal Institute of Regenerative Medicine, Bengaluru. Here, he investigated the roles of intracellular protein degradation and mitochondrial dynamics in the development of midbrain dopaminergic neurons in mice. Some of his research has been published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at national and international conferences.

He holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in biotechnology from Sir M Visvesvaraya Institute of Technology, Bengaluru, and a master of technology degree in genetic engineering from SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Kattankulathur, Tamil Nadu.

Mr. Joseph is particularly interested in science communication. His written words have appeared in several science media and education websites based in India. He loves to engage with people from diverse backgrounds and disciplines to exchange ideas on science, society, and culture. When he is not in the lab, he can be found reading, writing, listening to music, or watching stories based on real events.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Mr. Joseph is designing nanoparticulate drug delivery systems for immunomodulatory compounds. He is also comparing their efficacies with the free form of drugs using his 3D bioprinted T cell culture platform and validating them using a relevant in vivo mouse model.

Vidita Vaidya

Prof. Vidita Vaidya is Professor and Chairperson, the Department of Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. Prof. Vaidya’s research group at TIFR works on understanding the neurocircuitry of emotion, its modulation by life experience, and the alterations in emotional neurocircuitry that underlie complex psychiatric disorders, like anxiety and depression. Her work delves into how the experience of early adversity can recruit pathways regulated by the neurotransmitter, serotonin, to shape the long-term programming of mood-related behavior. Her research team also investigates the mechanistic details of the influence of pharmacological antidepressants and serotonergic psychedelics on mood-related behavior, in particular the consequences on bioenergetics in neuronal cells.

Prof. Vaidya received her undergraduate training at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai and her Ph.D. in neuroscience at Yale University. Following postdoctoral fellowships at Karolinska Institute and Oxford University, she returned to a faculty position at TIFR in 2000. She was the recipient of the Infosys Prize in Life Sciences in 2022. She is committed to mentorship, equity and diversity in STEM.

Prof. Vaidya’s Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence project is focussed on understanding the impact of serotonergic psychedelics on mitochondrial biogenesis and function in distinct limbic brain regions. Her work explores whether serotonergic psychedelics, through modulation of mitochondrial biogenesis and function, impact neuronal and synaptic plasticity, influence neuronal architecture and regulate mood-related behaviors.