Archives: Meet Our India Fulbrighters

Prateek Dey

Mr. Prateek Dey is a Ph.D. candidate at Sálim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. Through his doctoral thesis, he aims to assess genomic variations in select species of wild and domestic quails. Utilizing a combination of field data, next generation sequencing methods and bioinformatics tools, he aims to comprehensively map differences amongst morphologically similar quail species at a genomic scale. The findings of his doctoral thesis have been presented and published in various national and international conferences and journals.

Mr. Dey graduated with a degree in Integrated M.Sc. in life sciences from the Central University of Tamil Nadu. He has qualified for national level examinations such as GATE, CUCET and BU-CET with top ranks. Apart from academic interests in genetics, he likes to spend time trekking, birding and exploring serene or unexplored nature reserves. He also has a keen interest in cooking and in reading books related to historical events and personalities.

During his Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Mr. Dey is studying the demographic history and phylogenetic topology of Coturnix quails through whole genome approaches. He is working on assembling a high-quality genome of Coturnix coturnix, tracing its demographic history through coalescent modelling and generating a species level phylogenetic tree of the same. Through collaborative efforts, the findings of this study will bring forth a plethora of genome based evolutionary inferences that will be of high conservation importance for a wide variety of co-generic species in India.

Nikhil Dev Narendradev

Mr. Nikhil Dev Narendradev is a graduate student at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. His research interests lie broadly in mitochondrial homeostasis with a focus on understanding the cross-talk between endosomal E3 ligases and mitochondrial proteins. He co-authored some of his findings as publications in peer-reviewed international journals and at international conferences.

Mr. Narendradev holds an integrated master’s degree (BS-MS) in biological sciences with physical sciences as minor from IISER Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. He was awarded a very competitive INSPIRE-SHE fellowship by the Government of India as an undergraduate. He is recipient of fellowships from the Indian Academy of Science and the National University of Singapore to pursue his research interests during summer in India and Singapore. Outside the laboratory, he takes satisfaction in working with the underprivileged, participating in outreach activities, and in teaching. He likes to spend time traveling, meeting new people, understanding diverse cultures, and enjoys beaches and mountains.

During the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship period, Mr. Narendradev is employing cutting-edge proteomics technology tools to investigate signaling events involved in mitochondrial homeostasis, with a particular focus on identifying post-translational modifications that regulate mitochondrial structure and function. Research findings from this work are expected to unravel novel regulatory mechanisms required for maintaining a healthy population of mitochondria and to help identify potential targets for therapeutic intervention in pathological conditions.

Vaivab Das

Vaivab Das is a UGC Senior Research Fellow in sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), New Delhi. They have interdisciplinary training in Human Rights Law (NLSIU, Bangalore), Women and Gender Studies (TISS, Hyderabad), and English Literature (Ravenshaw University). They are interested in looking at the role of data cultures, law, gender and sexuality in the making of histories and policies for LGBTQIA+ persons in India.

They are an activist academician, who firmly believes that their academic goals are interwoven with fostering social change. They have worked towards the recognition of diverse gender and sexual minorities as protected categories, building gender-affirming infrastructures, and creating community spaces for LGBTQIA+ sensitization and awareness in various institutions. Recently, they worked on a writ petition for the horizontal reservation for transgender persons in public education and employment opportunities submitted to the Telangana High Court. In the past, Vaivab has worked as a technical expert on projects on gender-based violence, inclusive and accessible quality education, state welfare programs and livelihood schemes for the World Bank, Oxford Policy Management, Stanford University, and the Government of Odisha.

Vaivab’s Ph.D. project is an anthropological exploration of the bureaucratic, institutional, and socio-cultural barriers that impact the participation of transgender persons in democratic processes like elections in India. The project examines the conflict between law (legal rationality) and identity in the experiences of citizenship, along with the historical trajectories and political technologies that underpin the politics of the body and the body of politics in plural democracies.

During Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Vaivab is focusing on drawing a comparative understanding of how transgender persons navigate citizenship and elections as voters, candidates, and political representatives in the USA and in India.

Koushikey Chhapariya

Ms. Koushikey Chhapariya is a doctoral student at the Satellite Image Processing Lab, Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering (CSRE), IIT Bombay, Mumbai. She is working on an object-oriented deep CNN-based model for detecting selective features on hyperspectral images as part of her Ph.D. research. She is also a recipient of the Indo-French Raman-Charpak Fellowship 2022. She joined LISTIC Lab, Université Savoie Mont Blanc as a visiting research scholar in France to conduct a part of her Ph.D. thesis work. There she worked on a multi-task deep learning model for hyperspectral data for six months.

Ms. Chhapariya received the Prime Minister Research Fellowship in May 2021 under the lateral entry scheme. She completed her Master of Technology (M.Tech) from the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (IIRS), ISRO, Dehradun. As part of her master’s project, she developed a kernel-based Modified Possibilistic c-Means (MPCM) algorithm in the fuzzy-logic-based domain to handle non-linearity in data. She was also an intern with the Indian Institute of Human Settlement (IIHS), Bengaluru, where she worked on a data management portal, administrating metadata and web-portal development. Her research interest lies in the processing and analysis of satellite images, such as hyperspectral, multispectral, and thermal data. She loves to travel, explore new places, and read in her free time.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Chhapariya is focusing on developing a deep learning-based object detection and feature extraction model for hyperspectral satellite image analysis.

Sreerupa Bhattacharya

Ms. Sreerupa Bhattacharya is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay, Mumbai, where she examines the works of women photographers in twentieth-century India. By tracing a genealogy of women’s photographic practices, her Ph.D. seeks to explore hitherto obscured archives in order to engender the history of photography in India as well as provide fresh insights into the gendered lifeworlds of women in the twentieth century. Her research interests include visual culture, gender studies, technology studies and South Asian history.

Ms. Bhattacharya completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies in English literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, where she was awarded the Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (Sylff) for an independent research project on the Jewish community of Kolkata. She was a Young India Fellow at Ashoka University, where she received a postgraduate diploma in liberal studies. She also worked as Teaching Assistant at Ashoka University and IIT Bombay for a range of courses on gender and sexuality, film studies, literary culture and language training.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, she is undertaking archival research, gaining interdisciplinary methodological insights into the study of visual culture, and engaging with a global community of scholars and curators working on gender and photography.

Porkizhi Arjunan

Ms. Porkizhi Arjunan is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Stem Cell Research, Vellore, Tamil Nadu. Her doctoral research focuses on targeted non-viral vector-based gene therapy for hemophilia A and B (HA and HB) disorders, and her goal is to reduce bleeding in hemophilia patients while avoiding additional complications. During her Ph.D., she has also worked on other projects, such as making innovative nano-lithocholic lipidoids—a potential class of therapeutics for treating psoriasis. Furthermore, using novel liposomes, she assisted in the production of SARS-CoV-2 pseudovirions during the Covid-19 outbreak and contributed to the finding that Omicron infection increases IgG binding to spike protein of predecessor variants. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed international journals and has been presented at several national and international conferences.

Ms. Arjunan holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in biotechnology from Pondicherry University, Puducherry and Bharathidasan University, Tamil Nadu respectively. She also holds a diploma in computer applications and training. In addition to her work, she has a strong interest in social work, and likes traveling and meeting people from different cultures.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Arjunan is exploring the potential reach of the proposed “Development of Lipid Nanoparticle guided chemically modified Factor FVIII mRNA/NE-DNA Nucleic Acid Therapeutics for Hemophilia A.”

P.K. Yasser Arafath

Dr. P.K. Yasser Arafath is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Delhi and a historian of medieval and early modern India. He was L.M. Singhi Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge in 2017.

Dr. Arafath received his Ph.D. from the University of Hyderabad, and his research primarily focuses on South India. He is interested in its intellectual traditions, transliterated literature, history of violence, communities in the Indian Ocean, and the cultural history of the body and hygiene in the region. He has co-edited Sultana’s Sisters: Genre, Gender, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction (Routledge, 2021) and The Hijab: Islam, Women and the Politics of Clothing (Simon & Schuster, 2022). Dr. Arafath won the prestigious Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer Best Published Paper Award (2020–2021) for his research article that he published in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Arafath is examining how a section of South Asian Islamic scholars shaped the gender sensibilities of the Mappila-Muslims of Malabar by engaging with multiple discourses within the region and beyond in the 19th century. His project aims to do a systematic study of gender and sexuality in Arabi-Malayalam, a transliterated textual tradition in the Indian Ocean region that entails writing Malayalam —the native tongue of Kerala —in Arabic script. This study will add to the existing body of knowledge on gendered Islam in South Asia and gender discourses in South Asian Islamic cultures in the 19th century.

Madhu Singh

Dr. Madhu Singh is Professor at the Department of English and Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow. After a Ph.D. in modern British poetry, she branched into exploring different dimensions of the British rule in India. Her research interests over the last two decades include anticolonial movements in India, colonial epidemics, Indian Renaissance under colonialism, and documentation of endangered languages and communities. She recently edited a book titled Outbreaks: An Indian Pandemic Reader (Pencraft international, New Delhi, 2021), which deals with the complex challenges of past and present epidemics/pandemics in India in their socio-cultural, literary and historical contexts.

Dr. Singh received a visiting scholarship at the School of Asian and Oriental Studies (SOAS), University of London in 2018-19 for her project on the Bene Israel Jews of India.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Singh is working on “Revolutionary Print Culture, Ephemeral Remains, and Vernacular Subjectivities in North America During and After Ghadar Movement (1910-1940)”. She aims to trace the role of California-based periodicals by expatriate Punjabi-Sikh writers in the anticolonial struggle in India, spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is also redressing gaps and silences in existing research on the Ghadar movement from interdisciplinary perspectives.

Gourinath Samudrala

Prof. Gourinath Samudrala is Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He earned his M.Sc in biotechnology from the University of Pune and his Ph.D. from AIIMS, New Delhi. Before joining JNU, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Brandeis University, MA. Prof. Samudrala is well-recognized by several national organizations and science academies. Recently, he was awarded the STAR research award 2021 by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Government of India. He was also awarded the Innovative Young Biotechnologist Award, 2006 and the National Bioscience Award, 2013 by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India. In addition, he is a recipient of Indo-US Science and Technology fellowship, 2010, Visitors Award from President of India, 2016 and was elected as a fellow of prestigious Indian National Science Academy in 2018.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Prof. Samudrala is constructing and validating an artificial sarcomere using E. histolytica myosins. Understanding how myosins evolved is not only important to uncover the secrets of sarcomere, but also enables us to gain insights into how these molecules sustained the natural selection pressure. Will the filamentous unit from Entamoeba histolytica myosin-II be remarkably different from human nonmuscle myosin-II and other myosin-IIs. Prof. Samudrala’s project is exploring the possibility of artificial sarcomere/muscle fiber generation of an amoeboid myosin or any other myosin.

Nanditha Rao

Dr. Nanditha Rao is Assistant Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Bengaluru in the VLSI Systems group. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from IIT Bombay in 2017. Her research interests include FPGA based acceleration for machine learning, RISC-V and radiation-hardened designs. She has received the SERB Core Research Grant 2018, MITACS Globalink Research Award 2018 and SERB SUPRA research grant 2022.

Dr. Rao believes in encouraging students in technology and leadership roles. She took up administrative roles such as General Secretary of a women’s hostel in IIT Bombay for which she was awarded the Institute Organizational Citation. She is currently the associate warden of women’s hostel in IIIT Bangalore. She worked as a hardware design engineer at Intel for five years prior to her Ph.D. Her work at Intel involved signal integrity simulations of PCIe, LVDS, DisplayPort and HDMI interfaces. She received 13 Intel Spontaneous Recognition Awards and one Intel Divisional Recognition Award.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Rao is working on improving the performance of hardware accelerators for convolutional neural networks (CNN). CNNs are most commonly used today in computer vision, and image and video processing. The CNN accelerator implemented using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) enables significant performance improvement and power efficiency compared to GPU implementations. However, to improve the performance on the FPGA further, it is important to explore the appropriate mapping of the accelerator architecture onto optimal FPGA resources, which is what Dr. Rao is focusing on during this fellowship.