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

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.

Lalitha Kamath

Prof Lalitha Kamath is Professor and Chairperson of the Centre for Urban Policy and Governance, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. She has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Policy Development from Rutgers University.

Prof Kamath’s research interests include urban governance, planning, infrastructure, urban informality, and critical pedagogies. She writes on dominant forms of urban transformations in the Global South – both the structural violence of spatial transformation and processes of slow violence to urban environments. Her writing also demonstrates the agency of marginalized groups in challenging dominant urbanisms through ethnography, film and multimedia formats (see https://www.inhabitedsea.org/the-sea-and-the-city and https://makebreak.tiss.edu/)

Based on her ongoing work on climate planning in Mumbai, in her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Prof Kamath is doing two comparisons with estuarine cities in the U.S. and South Asia. First, to illuminate how expert-led planning interventions have marginalized littoral communities/environments and also how these communities demonstrate ‘ordinary’ expertise in climate changed cities. Second, to deepen cross-fertilization between Northern and Southern theoretical perspectives that challenge dominant planning expertise by building from the situated expertise of marginalized communities. This will help catalyze more just climate planning across both South and North

Ajay Gogia

Dr Ajay Gogia is an Additional Professor in the Department of Medical Oncology at All India Institute of Medical Sciences. He received his M.B.B.S, M.D. (Internal Medicine) degree from Banaras Hindu University, D.M. (Medical Oncology) from AIIMS, New Delhi.

He has over 17 years of working and teaching experience in Medical Oncology and specializes in Breast Cancer and Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. His research is well published with more than 400 peer-reviewed articles in National and International oncology journals He has received the Dronacharya Award for his excellence from the Health Minister of India.

Dr. Ajay Gogia’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to understand the molecular pathogenesis of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) and see the impact of Carboplatin and /or PARP inhibitor with standard dose-dense neoadjuvant chemotherapy on BRCA-associated triple-negative breast cancer. The precise stratification of TNBC is crucial for the development of potent standardized and targeted therapies, as it has a very poor prognosis. BRCA mutational status is the only clinically validated biomarker for personalized therapy in TNBC.

Pijush Ghosh

Prof. Pijush Ghosh is a professor in the Department of Applied Mechanics and Biomedical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Madras. His research group focuses on design and fabrication of stimuli responsive soft actuators. Solvent and light are the two major stimuli that his group is working on. He applies molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the underlying mechanism involved in solvent triggered actuation and polymer-solvent interaction. His group also works on developing polymer-clay and polymer-concrete interfaces for different civil engineering projects. Mechanical investigation of cluster crystals is another area of his research interest.

Prof. Ghosh received his undergraduate degree in civil engineering from Bengal Engineering College, Shibpur Howrah, MTech from IIT Kanpur and Ph.D. from North Dakota State University. He did a brief postdoc at Johns Hopkins University. He worked for about three years in URS corporation before joining IIT Madras in 2011.

Besides research and teaching, Prof. Ghosh takes a deep interest in rural education. He has started an initiative called ‘Teach to Learn’ (www.teachtolearn.co.in)  about 10 years back, which focus on connecting the premier institute of the country with rural schools applying different education models.

Sutapa Dutta

Sutapa Dutta is Professor of English at Gargi College, University of Delhi. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her research interests and publications are on eighteenth and nineteenth-century writings, and cover gender, education, and identity in colonial India.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London, and has been a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. She has received several national and international grants for research work and has published extensively. She has authored British Women Missionaries in Bengal, 1793-1861, and Disciplined Subjects: Schooling in Colonial Bengal, and has edited Mapping India: Transitions and Transformations, 18th -19th Century, British Women Travellers: Empire and Beyond 1770-1870 and Making the ‘Woman’: Discourses of Gender in 18th-19th Century India.

Prof. Sutapa Dutta’s Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence project seeks to study the role of American women missionaries in India in the 19th century, and their contribution towards female education and health care. A critical understanding of their agency in the past will enable us to perceive present shifts in perceptions of women’s question by evangelists and conservative religious denominations across social and religious platforms in the U.S. and India.

 

Vasudharani Devanthan

Dr Vasudharani Devanthan is Associate Professor, Department of Biology and Associate Dean of Students at IISER Tirupati. Dr Devanathan’s research group at IISER Tirupati is engaged in understanding the structure and functional changes induced in retinal neurons in altered metabolic conditions such as hyperglycemia and hypoxia. Their research will contribute to understanding signaling mechanisms underlying diabetic retinopathy and the impact of glucose insult to neurons in long term diabetes. Collaborating with clinicians in Tirupati area, she is also engaged in novel biomarkers for Glioblastoma.

Dr Devanathan completed her postgraduate degree from the University of Madras and was working in Astra Zeneca, Bengaluru as a junior scientist. She completed her Ph.D. from Center for Molecular Neurosciences in Hamburg. She did her postdoctoral studies in university hospitals of Duesseldorf and Tübingen. She returned to India and had a short stint at the M.S University of Baroda (Dr Vikram Sarabhai Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology) as a teaching faculty. She has been with IISER Tirupati since its inception from 2015.

Dr Devanathan’s Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence project is focused on understanding the electrophysiological changes in retinal neurons altered glucose and will be engaged in mouse behavioral studies.

Debasish Borah

Dr. Debasish Borah is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati. He obtained his MSc-PhD dual degree from IIT Bombay in 2012 and subsequently worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics, Tezpur University before joining IIT Guwahati in 2015. He has received several awards, including the Canadian Commonwealth Fellowship, Young Scientist Medal from the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), Young Scientist Award from the National Academy of Sciences, India (NASI) and the Government of Assam, India among others.

Dr. Borah’s research interest lies in the area of dark matter (DM), baryon asymmetry of the universe (BAU) and the origin of neutrino mass which cannot be explained by the standard model (SM) of particle physics, motivating the need for beyond standard model (BSM) physics. During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Borah is planning to study different BSM scenarios explaining the origin of BAU with the aim of probing them at ongoing and future colliders through conventional and new search strategies. He also plans to find synergy among collider probes and several indirect detection prospects at gravitational wave and cosmology experiments.

Sudip Bhattacharyya

Prof. Sudip Bhattacharyya is a professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, Maharashtra. He is also the current Payload Manager of the Soft X-ray Telescope aboard AstroSat, the first dedicated Indian astronomy satellite. He primarily works on extremely compact cosmic objects, such as neutron stars and black holes. These objects provide excellent opportunities to probe extreme aspects of physics, such as strong gravity, high magnetic field, accretion-ejection mechanism, high-density degenerate matter, and gravitational waves, which cannot be studied in terrestrial laboratories. Prof. Bhattacharyya studies these objects primarily using X-ray satellite data and theoretical modelling. Prof. Bhattacharyya did his Ph.D. in astrophysics at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru, and was a Research Associate at the University of Maryland at College Park and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the USA, before joining a faculty position at TIFR in 2007. He received the NASA Space Science Achievement Award in 2007.

Prof. Bhattacharyya’s Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence project aims to study the evolution of rapidly spinning neutron stars to probe their fundamental aspects. The project can be relevant for several Indian and U.S. observatories.

Shilpa Ashok Pandit

Shilpa Pandit is an Associate Professor, at the School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University, Gujarat. Dr. Pandit’s research has focused on immersive experiences of Indian art and aesthetics; how affect generates well-being from philosophical and lived perspectives. As part of her enquiry, Dr. Pandit has worked with music and dance students, teachers and performing communities in some Indian cities. Dr. Pandit’s search for elements of immersive well-being in Indian music theory and practice are part of her studentship in both psychology and music. At Ahmedabad University, she teaches social, developmental as well as positive psychology, having completed her education in psychology from Delhi university and the University of Madras.

In her other avatars, Shilpa has co-founded a Bengaluru based NGO—Dreampath Foundation that works with adolescents for career exploration and counseling; worked with NGOs in the domains of health, nutrition and livelihoods. She worked closely on rural employment, as a UNDP Research Officer at MoRD, from 2014-2016. She was also a Chevening CRISP scholar, studying at University of Oxford, UK in 2018.

Through the Fulbright fellowship, Dr. Pandit is working closely with domain experts in music and Indian philosophers of well-being, to generate new insights on the relationship between, self, affect, art/aesthetics and well-being.

Indranil Acharya

Dr Indranil Acharya is Professor of English at Vidyasagar University, West Bengal. He specializes in the documentation and translation of Bengali Dalit narratives on the tragic plight of Partition refugees and the victims of Bangladesh Liberation War (1971). Survival and Other Stories: Anthology of Bangla Dalit Stories (2012) and Listen to the Flames: Texts and Readings from the Margins (2016) are two major publications in this area. He has also researched on the documentation, translation and digital archiving of endangered languages and cultures of Eastern India. The Languages of West Bengal (2019) is a seminal publication in this field. Dr Acharya has led an indigenous literary movement in Eastern India through a multilingual publication titled Janajati Darpan (since 2017).

During his tenure as a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence scholar, Dr Acharya intends to expand the scope of his archival research on endangered folk performance traditions of Bengal- a project he had been working on since 2013. Through the translation of some critically endangered folk forms, he wants to explore the issue of graded inequality among the ex-untouchables. He would also attempt to trace the continuities of such dying traditions among the Dalit diaspora in the United States.