Fulbright-Nehru Grant Category India: Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellowships

Raj Mukhopadhyay

Dr. Raj Mukhopadhyay obtained his bachelor’s degree from Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya, West Bengal, in 2012 and a master’s degree from Banaras Hindu University, Uttar Pradesh, in 2014. He received his PhD from ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute in 2018. He is currently working as a s cientist at ICAR-Central Soil Salinity Research Institute . His research focused on removal of organic and inorganic contaminants (metals, metalloids and emerging contaminants) from soil and water using surface modified natural clay minerals, biowastes, and nanomaterials. Dr. Mukhopadhyay has published about 25 papers on environmental remediation in journals of national and international repute. He received the IC-IMPACTS (the India-Canada Centre for Innovative Multidisciplinary Partnerships to Accelerate Community Transformation and Sustainability) Summer Institute Award on “Nanotechnologies for Safe & Sustainable Infrastructure, Integrated Water Management and Public Health”, from University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, in 2016 and the Clay Minerals Group Bursary A ward in 2019 from the Clay Minerals Group of Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland, UK .

While Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are contaminants of global concern and known as ‘forever chemicals’ due to their extremely persistent nature, development of novel, inexpensive and eco-friendly technologies is the need of the hour to tackle the PFAS issues in water and soil systems. D uring Dr. Mukhopadhyay’s Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, he is developing engineered clay mineral adsorbents using naturally available clay minerals and biowastes for removing PFAS from contaminated water and reducing PFAS bioavailability to wheat crop, deciphering an inexpensive and green PFAS remediation method.

Utkarsh Kumar

Prof. Utkarsh Kumar has taught as a guest Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, New Delhi. Prof. Kumar received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Delhi in 2019. He was the recipient of the ICSSR Doctoral Fellowship. Dr. Kumar obtained his Masters in Social Work from the prestigious Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Maharashtra. Previously, during his professional stint in the development sector with PRADAN, Prof. Kumar designed and implemented various livelihood prototypes at the grassroots. His research interests span Anthropology of Care and Caring profession, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and the political economy of mineral resource extraction. Prof. Kumar has several research articles to his credit. I n 2020, Prof. Kumar authored commissioned research documents on the ongoing conflict and negotiations around mega power projects in Jharkhand. He has also offered consultancy for the ‘just transition’ in the e nergy sector to s outh Asia- based advocacy groups, viz. The Research Collective and Public Finance and Public Accountability Collective.

The Heavy Mining Equipment (HME) technology has arguably become a crucial global mediator in resource extractive industrial operations. A multi-site ethnographic field stint expedited by the Fulbright-Nehru P ostdoctoral Research grant is an attempt to understand the designing imperatives of the HME machinery produced in the global North, and to trace social relations fostered and shaped around deployment practices of these machines in the global South. The aim is to capture socio-cultural imaginations and aspirations of social actors and institutions associated with the designing, circulation, and deployment practices of HME technology.

Rahul Kumar

Dr. Rahul Kumar is currently a postdoctoral F ellow at the Center for Geometry and Physics, Institute for Basic Science, POSTECH, South Korea. He obtained his BSc from B S A C ollege, Mathura, Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Agra, Uttar Pradesh, and his MSc from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He then completed his PhD in October 2020 from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar under the supervision of Prof. Atul Dixit. His research interests are in analytic number theory, special functions, and the theory of partitions. The work of Ramanujan also influences Dr. Kumar’s research. Over the years, he has worked on various topics such as the Lambert series, zeros and special values of certain L-functions, and the theory of zeta and Bessel functions arising from modular relations, etc. He has published several research papers in reputed international journals. He has qualified for IIT-JAM, CSIR-NET, and GATE examinations. Recently, he was selected for the NBHM postdoctoral F ellowship.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow , Dr. Kumar will be joining the Department of Mathematics, Penn State University, University Park, USA. The study of Selberg L-functions has been of great interest to mathematicians since Selberg introduced them. During his stint, Dr. Kumar will also study the theory of these L-functions apart from developing the theory of generalized Hurwitz zeta and polylogarithm functions. The latter two functions have appeared in his (and others) recent works on modular relations and Herglotz functions.

Debanjan Konar

Dr. Debanjan Konar earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) from the University of Burdwan , in 2010, an MTech in CSE from the National Institute of Technical Teachers’ Training and Research (NITTTR), Kolkata , in 2012, and a PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in New Delhi , in 2021. He is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), Germany. Prior to this, Dr. Konar served as an Assistant Professor at Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology, Sikkim , and SRM University-AP, Andhra Pradesh . His research interests include quantum machine learning (QML), hybrid classical-quantum neural networks, deep learning, and computer vision. He has authored several papers in prestigious computer science journals, conference proceedings, book chapters, and internationally renowned books. Dr. Konar received a National Scholarship in 2001 and a GATE Postgraduate Fellowship in 2010. He is an IEEE senior member and an ACM member. He also serves as an editor and a reviewer for several esteemed journals and international conferences.

Recently, Quantum Computing (QC) has been leveraged for machine learning with the expectation that the uncertainty inherent in QC may be used to great advantage in stochastic-based modelling , spurring new research on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. To exploit the advantages of stochastic-based modelling in QML research, Dr. Konar has proposed Spiking Quantum Neural Networks using hybrid classical-quantum algorithms with the merits of superposition states and amplitude encoding. Within this Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow ship, the proposed models will be extensively validated on various computer vision applications, including disguised facial recognition using the PennyLane Quantum Simulator with limited quantum hardware and supercomputing resources available at Purdue University, USA.

Aasim Khan

Dr. Aasim Khan is Head and Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Science and Humanities, IIIT-Delhi. He completed his PhD in Politics and Public Policy (Contemporary India) from the India Institute, King’s College London in 2018 and has an MA from the AJK Mass Communication Research Center, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He also completed an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London and a Bachelor of Science from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. His research and commentaries have appeared in academic publications and popular media , including the India Review, Communication, Culture and Critique, the Economic and Political Weekly, Culture Unbound, Global Policy and Television and New Media. He has also published several book chapters including in a book volume on digital transformations in urban India called DigiNaka (Orient Blackswan, 2020). Prior to joining academia, Dr. Khan was a journalist for several years in the CNN- affiliated national news network CNN-IBN, and also worked in international development as the South Asia officer for Oxfam GB. In 2015, as a Fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute, Berlin , he co-authored a five-country collaborative study on the future of the internet. Since September 2021, he has also been affiliated as an Associate Researcher at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH Delhi).

Sneha Gole

Dr. Sneha Gole completed her B A in Political Science from Fergusson College, Pune, Maharashtra, and has a masters’ degree in S ocial W ork from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Maharashtra. She subsequently completed her doctoral work in 2018 in the discipline of Women’s Studies from the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, examining the women’s movement in the post 1990 period, mapping new spaces, strategies and issues of the movement. Her research areas are social movements, with a particular focus on women’s movements, gender and development, and gender and culture. She teaches papers on feminisms, feminist research methodology, and gender and popular culture, among others. Her other areas of engagement and research have been gender and higher education, the social history and cultural politics of K athak and the issue of declining child sex ratios. She was awarded the Awaben Wadia Archival Fellow ship by RCWS, SNDT University to work on an archive of life narratives of young feminists, 2017-18.

The present context is one of renewed backlash against feminism, both in India and the US and the increasing erosion of hard-won rights for ‘women’. Dr. Gole’s research funded by the Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow ship titled ‘Understanding feminist subjectivities in the times of intersectionality: Linking Narratives, Memory and Politics’ is an attempt to understand the predicament of the feminist project in the current moment and imagine possible productive futures for it, by bringing insights from memory studies to life narrative analysis and mapping the particular trajectory of the concept of intersectionality in the context of India.

Suparna Basu

Dr. Suparna Basu obtained BSc (Hons.) in Statistics from University of Calcutta in 2011, M.Sc. in Statistics from Banaras Hindu University in 2013. She obtained PhD in statistics in the 2018 from Banaras Hindu University under the supervision of Prof. Sanjay K. Singh. She was awarded with the BHU-CRET Fellowship, UGC-NET Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) and BSR-JRF during her PhD, although she had availed only the first two. Her thesis work was directed towards estimation techniques for various Time censored situations encountered in life-testing problems for two heavy-tailed distributions. Her research works have been published in journals of international repute. Dr. Basu has served as an Assistant Professor in the University of Burdwan during Feb. 2016 – Dec. 2019 and taught several courses to M.Sc. (Statistics) students, in addition to administrative and research endeavors. Thereafter, she joined Banaras Hindu University and has been actively involved in teaching, research and administration. She was awarded with the IOE-BHU, start-up grant of Rs. 6 lakhs in July, 2020.

Location-shifted Weibull, Gamma and Generalized exponential distributions, fails to meet an important regularity condition of the support being independent of unknown parameters. This impedes derivation of estimation techniques, especially those based on likelihood function like globally consistent estimators for complete/censored situation or any testing criterion to discriminate suitability of two competing models. Dr. Basu would explore some robust statistical estimation techniques for such non-regular distributions and illustrate its applicability on real data sets during her postdoctoral stint supported by the Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.

Anupam Banerjee

Prof. Anupam Banerjee is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur since November 2021. Prior to this, Anupam was a postdoctoral researcher at Niigata University, Japan. Anupam pursued his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Ramananda Chakrabarti at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, and was conferred the degree in 2018. He received an MSc in Geology from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 2011 and a BSc in Geology from Presidency College Kolkata, University of Calcutta, in 2009.

Prof. Banerjee’s research interest lies in the applications of radiogenic, and non-traditional stable isotopes of magmatic rocks to understanding both Earth’s surface and deep interior processes. He has published several research articles in peer-reviewed international journals. Prof. Banerjee is a recipient of the Institute Medal from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore for the best PhD thesis. He is also a recipient of several grants for attending international conferences which include the SERB Travel support, Student Travel Grant from the American Geophysical Union, GARP Travel Grants from IISc .

Prof. Banerjee’s research during the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship is aimed at elucidating Earth’s deep carbon cycle using novel Mg and Zn stable isotopic compositions of carbon-rich magmatic rocks, called carbonatites. Important corollary questions that will be addressed in this project are: (i) How did Earth’s interior maintain the inventory of carbon with time? (ii) When did Earth’s carbon inventory establish and how did it change over geological time?

Shruti Suriyakumar

Dr. Shruti Suriyakumar did her post-graduation at Lady Doak College, Madurai, where she majored in physics and joined CSIR-Central Electrochemical Research Institute (CECRI), Karaikudi for her Ph.D. Her doctoral thesis on developing nanostructured composite cathodes, permselective separators, and ionic liquid-based hybrid electrolytes for lithium-sulfur batteries was conferred the Best Thesis award in Physical Sciences from the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), New Delhi.

Dr. Suriyakumar later received the National Post Doctoral Fellowship at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Thiruvananthapuram (IISER TVM). Her research was focused on developing sulphide-based solid electrolytes for sodium batteries. As a project scientist at IISER TVM, she has contributed to developing solid electrolytes for lithium and sodium batteries and has been involved in designing electrodes and electrolytes for next-generation battery chemistries.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellow, Dr. Suriyakumar’s research at Rice University, Houston, TX is focusing on electrode-electrolyte interface engineering for solid-state batteries. The project involves the rational design of 2D materials, introducing them as interlayers/ coatings between the solid-solid point of contact and regulating the lithium-ion flux, thereby improving the cycling stability and performance of all-solid-state lithium batteries.

Harshit Sosan Lakra

Dr. Harshit Sosan Lakra, a proud Oraon tribe woman from India, serves as assistant professor in the Department of Architecture and Planning and joint faculty at the Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems at IIT Roorkee. She holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from MANIT, Bhopal and a master’s degree in environmental planning from CEPT, Ahmedabad. Dr. Lakra was a FORD Foundation International fellow, which enabled her to pursue her second master’s in urban and regional planning from Cornell University in 2009, with a focus on international studies in planning. At Cornell University, she won the Cornell Urban Scholarship award and the Graduate Research Scholarship award. She completed her doctoral research at IIT Roorkee in 2019. In 2023, Dr, Lakra was selected as a Himalayan University Consortium fellow through which she co-leads a workgroup and collaborates with women leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bhutan, and Bangladesh.

Dr. Lakra is leading national and international projects focusing on Tribal Human Development Index (HDI), adaptation of indigenous and local knowledge systems, and Fintech Solutions for comprehensive tribal development in Chhattisgarh, along with GoAL (gender-orientated adaptive learning) for climate change and disaster risk resilience in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Japan, indicating her interdisciplinary interest.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellow, Dr. Lakra intends to create a platform for discourse, co- and cross-learning on housing, culture, and environment at different scales and connect students, stakeholders, and indigenous communities from India and the U.S. The project will bring diverse understanding and experiences, especially for the domain and community that is less researched.