Fulbright-Nehru Grant Category India: Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)

Srubabati Goswami

Prof. Srubabati Goswami, Senior Professor at the Physical Research Laboratory, Gujarat, is an internationally acclaimed neutrino physicist and is recognized as a world expert in her field of research. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Calcutta in 1998. She has received several awards, including the Humboldt fellowship from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the J.C. Bose National fellowship of Departmental Science and Technology, India among others. She is an elected fellow of all the three science academies in India as well as The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS).

The Standard Model (SM) is exceptionally successful in describing the properties of the fundamental particles. However, Prof. Goswami is currently interested in pursuing theoretical motivations and experimental observations that tread beyond the SM. Among these, neutrino oscillations, observed in terrestrial experiments, which requires neutrinos to be massive and mix amongst different flavors, provided compelling evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM). Apart from oscillations, there can be several other signatures of BSM physics, including non-standard interactions, existence of extra neutrino species, and decay of neutrinos. The signatures of dark matter can also be looked into in various neutrino experiments.

During her tenure as a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence scholar, Prof. Goswami is working on exploring BSM physics in neutrino experiments, specifically in the context of a liquid Argon detector, as in the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. The novelty of the project is to consider both the beam and the atmospheric neutrinos, and to investigate the synergy between these in enhancing the sensitivity of the experiment.

Parikshit Gogoi

Dr. Parikshit Gogoi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Nowgong College (Autonomous), Nagaon, Assam. He obtained his M.Sc. in chemistry from Cotton University, Guwahati in 2001, M.Tech. in petroleum refining and petrochemicals from Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh in 2003, and Ph.D. in chemical engineering from CSIR-NEIST, Jorhat in 2010. Before joining Nowgong College, he worked in the Department of Chemistry at IIT Guwahati as technical staff. His current research interests are biomass-based chemicals, fuels and materials, natural products chemistry, and nanomaterials synthesis for catalytic applications.

He received the INSA Summer Research Fellowship for Teachers in 2014 from the Indian National Academy of Science, Bengaluru, and worked at the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (CSIR-IICT), Hyderabad. In 2016, he was awarded the Raman Fellowship for Post Doctoral Research at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, by the University Grants Commission, and he contributed significantly to biomass conversion research. In 2021, he was awarded the Dulal Chandra Goswami Memorial Research Award by Nowgong College (Autonomous).

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Gogoi aims for the catalytic conversion of biomass/lignin bio-oils to aromatics and fuel range hydrocarbons using polyoxometallate catalysts. For upgrading bio-oil to high-valued hydrocarbon fuel or chemicals, catalytic hydrodeoxygenation (HDO), an energy-intensive process that requires high temperature and hydrogen gas pressure, is essential. Dr. Gogoi is working on developing catalyst systems to achieve HDO at low temperatures and moderate hydrogen pressure. This process will bring a new understanding of effective utilization of lignin in a biorefinery, benefitting its economy.

Shabana Bano

Dr. Shabana Bano is Associate Professor of Psychology at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, where she also received her Ph.D. She is the recipient of a National Scholarship awarded by the Government of India, a Shastri-Indo Canadian Faculty Mobility Fellowship, and a Witkin-Okonji Award. Her research investigates social identity, acculturation, mutual attitudes, psycho-social adaptation and intercultural relations among Indian Hindus and Muslims, with a special focus on how traditional Sanskrit and Quranic schools influence the psychosocial development of children and adolescents. Her work includes cross-cultural projects based in Canada, Switzerland and the USA, and she served as Visiting Fellow at the University of Guelph, Canada and Visiting Scholar at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. She is widely published nationally and internationally. Most recently, she co-edited the volume Understanding Psychology in the Context of Relationship, Community, Workplace and Culture (Springer, 2021).

Dr. Bano’s Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence project investigates the possibility that school attainment has consequences for the socialization of Muslim women’s identity and their psychosocial adaptation. Her project does a comparative study of religious Muslim schools and secular schools in the United States and in India. This project will help promote the development of gender equality attitudes and positive gender identity among young women through school attainment, whether religious or secular.

Satyajit Sahu

Dr. Satyajit Sahu has been serving as an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics, IIT Jodhpur since 2021. He earned his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute for the Cultivation of Science in 2009 and completed his postdoctoral research at the National Institute for Materials Science, Japan, in 2012. He then joined the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur as an Assistant Professor in 2013. Dr Sahu has been honored with several prestigious awards, including the SPARC DUO fellowship in 2019 and the BRICS Young Scientist Forum award in 2020. In 2022, he was awarded the SERB SIRE fellowship for collaborative research at the University of Toronto. His current research focuses on the study of semiconductor devices utilizing quantum dots, 2D materials, and organic materials, with a particular interest in exploring the use of single molecules for electronic applications. He has authored over 80 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence scholar, Dr. Sahu is concentrating on the synthesis and characterization of double halide perovskite materials to develop memristors with enhanced performance. He aims to explore the potential application of these memristors in neuromorphic systems, seeking to improve their efficiency and functionality.

Sriparna Saha

Dr. Sriparna Saha is currently serving as an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Patna, India. She has authored or co-authored more than 400 papers. Her current research interests include machine-learning, deep-learning, natural-language-processing, and biomedical-information-extraction. She is the recipient of Google-India-Women-in-Engineering-Award-2008, NASI-Young-Scientist-Platinum-Jubilee-Award-2016, BIRD Award-2016, IEI-Young-Engineers’-Award-2016, SERB-Women-in-Excellence-Award-2018, Pattern-Recognition-Letters-Editor-Award-2023, prestigious “Young-Faculty-Research-Fellowship” under Visvesvaraya-PhD-Scheme for Electronics-&-IT for-5-years (Jan 2019-Jan 2024), Humboldt-Research-Fellowship, Indo-U.S.-Fellowship-for-Women-in-STEMM-2018. She won the best paper awards in ICONIP 2023, CLINICAL-NLP workshop of COLING 2016, and Area-chair-award (Information Extraction) at IJCNLP-AACL 2023.

With her Fulbright fellowship, at University of South Carolina, Sriparna is working towards developing some unified large language models (LLM) for low-resource settings. In general, it has been shown in the recent literature that the existing LLMs are not performing well for low resource Indian languages like Bengali. This disparity raises concerns about the fairness of LLMs, as it may lead to biased outcomes and unequal access to information and resources for speakers of low-resource languages. In this project Sriparna aims to develop some LLMs for low-resource language setting by developing a scalable training approach using reinforcement learning from human feedback.

Ujjwal Maulik

Prof. Ujjwal Maulik is a full Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jadavpur University since 2004. He was also the former head of the same department. He has worked in many universities and research laboratories in Australia, China, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Slovenia and U.S. and also delivered lectures in many more countries. He is the Fellow of India (INAE), India, National Academy of Science India (NASI), International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), US, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), U.S., Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), Singapore and Distinguish Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He is a Distinguish Speaker of IEEE as well as ACM. His research interests include machine learning, pattern analysis, data science, bioinformatics and computational biology, multi-objective optimization, social networking, IoT and autonomous car. In these areas he has published ten books, more than three hundred fifty papers, mentored several start-ups, filed several patents and already guided twenty five doctoral students. His other interests include outdoor sports and classical music.

During his tenure as Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship Prof. Maulik is working for the better understanding of newly developed NicE-seq technology for chromatin accessibility through the application of artificial intelligence (AI) methods. This research has the potential to uncover novel regulatory mechanisms and advance our understanding of the functional genomics landscape. The AI-driven approaches can expedite and enhance chromatin accessibility studies, leading to advancements in various fields, including gene regulation, disease mechanisms, and therapeutic development.

Pradeep Kumar Misra

Prof. Pradeep Kumar Misra is a Professor and Director of the Centre for Policy Research in Higher Education (CPRHE) at the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA), New Delhi. His research specializations are higher education, teacher education, and educational technology.

He has received several prestigious international research scholarships like the Commonwealth Academic Fellowship of CSC, UK; Doctoral and Senior Researcher Scholarship of DAAD, Germany; Erasmus Mundus Visiting Scholar Scholarship of European Commission; National Scholarship of Slovak Republic; MASHAV Scholarship of Israel Government; and Research Exchange Scholarship of FMSH, France.

He widely published nationally and internationally, completed research and development projects, and developed educational media programs. His recent books, Teaching Competencies for 21st Century Teachers: Practical Approaches to Learning (Routledge, 2024) and Learning and Teaching for Teachers (Springer, 2021), impact teachers’ teaching practices globally.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship, Prof. Misra is examining the policies and practices of different U.S. universities to gain insights into how they integrate technology to offer EQUAL educational opportunities to their students. Through his research, Prof. Misra aims to benefit Indian and U.S. universities to learn valuable lessons and take necessary cautions when incorporating technology into their academic programs.

Ashutosh Kumar

Ashutosh Kumar is an Associate Professor of History at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. He earned his Ph.D. from the History Department of the University of Delhi, where he also taught from 2012 to 2014. He received South-South Exchange Program for Research on the History of Development (SEPHIS), a Government of Netherlands funded program Fellowship during his Ph.D. He was fellow at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom; Yale University, USA; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, and at Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla. He is president of Indian Association for South Asian Studies (IASAS) and Chairman of Centre for Alternative Studies in Social Sciences, New Delhi.

His most recent publications include Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830-1920’, Cambridge University Press, 2017 and ‘Girmitiyas and Global Indian Diaspora: Origins, Memories and Identities’ Cambridge University Press, 2023.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence scholar, Dr. Kumar is exploring issue of rights of Indian indentured laborers on colonial sugar plantations during nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the letters, petitions and depositions of indentured Indian migrants with a particular emphasis on the letters they wrote in regional Indian language. His project analyses such laborers’ letters and makes the case that Indian indentured laborers were able to fight for their “rights”, natural and contractual with planters and the colonial government through petitions, in addition to being able to voice their feelings and concerns on a variety of other matters.

Manzoor Koyakutty

Dr Manzoor Koyakutty is a Professor at Amrita Center for Nanoscience and Molecular Medicine, Kochi. He has worked extensively in molecular mechanisms responsible for cancer progression, drug-resistance, and tumor immunology, and developed many novel cancer-nanomedicine formulations and immunotherapeutic for leukemia, liver tumor and glioblastoma. His lab currently investigates systemic immune-suppression in peripheral organs as well as local tumor-microenvironment and developing novel nano-bio engineering tools to overcome such immune-suppression.

He has published > 150 papers in peer reviewed journals including Biomaterials, Small, J. of Controlled Release, Sci. Reports, Int. J Immunopharmacology with H-index 48 and citation 10530, and filed 40 patents of which 20 granted and 06 licensed for translational development. He was elected as Fellow of National Academy of Science, India (2017), top 2% scientist by Stanford University rating, 2022, received Amrita University Faculty Gold Medal 2023, and Chancellors Award 2024.

During the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship, he is working with Dr Henry Brem and Dr Betty Tylor, Glioma Center, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, USA, for the combinatorial targeting of brain tumor immuno-biology using intracranially injectable nano-hydrogel system. This work may help glioma patients to have better therapeutic outcome.

Naorem Kiranmala Devi

Dr. Naorem Kiranmala Devi currently serves as an Associate Professor at the University of Delhi. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Delhi.

Her research focuses on demographic and genomic variations among populations, particularly in India’s northeast region. Dr. Devi specializes in nutritional anthropology, biochemical genetics, and molecular anthropology. Through her research initiatives she has extensively explored the population specific risk factors of cardio-metabolic disorders in India along with the associated genetic and epigenetic alterations. With substantial experience in academia, she has contributed to course development, conference organization, and research administration. She has published over 40 research articles and book chapters, exploring diverse topics such as cardiovascular health, genetic polymorphisms, epigenetic studies, and socio-cultural determinants of health. Additionally, she actively engages in community service, particularly in raising awareness about health issues such as thalassemia and hypertension through outreach programs and screening camps.

Dr. Kiranmala’s Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence project aims to identify and understand the implicit cultural components of the hypertension management programs in the U.S. and India, and work with local experts to explore ways to develop a culturally appropriate intervention module for the management of hypertension in high-risk communities of Punjab, India.