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Boaz Atzili

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Center-Periphery Interaction in Indian western Himalayan Borderlands, 1947-1977
Field of Study:	Political Science
Home Institution:	American University, Washington, DC
Host Institution:	Birla Institute of Technology and Science-Pilani, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Boaz Atzili is an Associate Professor at the School of International Service of American University in Washington DC. He holds a PhD in Political Science from MIT and a BA from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Before coming to AU Dr. Atzili held a post-doctoral fellowship in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard University. His research focuses on territorial conflicts and peace, the politics of borders and borderlands, the security aspects of state weakness, and deterrence and coercion. He published two books, Good Fences Bad Neighbors: Border Fixity and International Conflict (University of Chicago Press: 2012), and Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States that Host Nonstate Actors (Columbia University Press: 2018, with Wendy Perlman), as well as edited Territorial Designs and International Politics (Routledge: 2018, with Burak Kaderchan). His articles have been published, among other venues, in International Security, Security Studies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, International Studies Review, and Territory, Politics, Governance.

Among other awards, Dr. Atzili’s work has gained the 2006 Edger E. Furniss Award for the best first book in international security from the Mershon Center for International Security, and the Kenneth N. Waltz Prize for the best 2006 dissertation in the area of security studies, from the American Political Science Association.

Dr. Atzili’s current project focuses on borderlands and buffer zones. He is interested in the way in which the interaction between center and periphery in borderlands affect interstate relations at the border, and the way international relations affect center-periphery relations within the borderlands. The project includes quantitative and qualitative components and an inter-regional comparison of South Asia and the Middle East.

India inherited from its British colonialists the notion that modern nation-state’s sovereignty stretches uniformly up to a country’s borders. But it also inherited a reality in which the presence of the state in its remote mountainous borderlands was very scarce. Dr. Atzili’s Fulbright-Nehru project seeks an investigation of center-periphery relations in the Indian borderlands with China and Nepal in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and Ladakh. Through archival research and interviews, the research aims to advance our understanding of the role of center-periphery interaction in shaping perceptions, policies, and realities in the western Himalayas, at the edge of the Indian state.

Mark Balmforth

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Buried Legacies: Slavery, Caste, and Dye Root Digging in the Indian Ocean, 1660-1820
Field of Study:	Energy
Home Institution:	At-Large, At-Large
Host Institution:	Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	February 2023
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Mark Balmforth is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. His work analyses inherited inequality in histories of encounter between South Asians, Europeans, and Americans. His first book project, titled “Schooling the Master: Caste Supremacy and American Education in British Ceylon,” charts the entwining of caste, nation, and gender in American missionary schools in Ceylon and was awarded the History of Education Society’s 2021 Claude A. Eggertsen Prize. Dr. Balmforth’s second major research project, tentatively titled “Buried Legacies: Slavery and Caste in the Indian Ocean,” rethinks connections between enslavement, caste, and migration in the Indian Ocean by tracing the 300-year odyssey of an oppressed-caste Tamil community from the 17th to the 20th centuries. His work has been published in the History of Education Quarterly, Review of Development & Change, CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion, and the International Journal of Asian Christianity.

Legacies of slavery shape conversations around the world about contemporary social and economic injustice. Over the last decade, scholars of South Asia have started to consider slavery’s impact on contemporary lives in the subcontinent, countering the dominant public and scholarly reliance upon terms like “bonded labor” or “agrestic servitude.” Contributing to the ongoing global conversation about slavery’s legacy, Dr. Balmforth’s Fulbright-Nehru project asks: what can the history of Dalit dye root-digging communities in India reveal about the intertwined careers of slavery and caste in South Asia?

Ramesh Dangol

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Spatial mobility, human extensibility and women’s employment capabilities in high violence against women areas
Field of Study:	Business
Home Institution:	Youngstown State University, Youngstown, OH
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Management – Kozhikode, Kozhikode, Kerala
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Ramesh Dangol joined Youngstown State University (YSU) in 2012 after completing a PhD in strategic management from Purdue University in Indiana. Since joining YSU, he has published manuscripts in Strategic Management Journal, International Journal of Production Economics, International Business Review, and Journal of International Management. His research focuses on how individuals and organizations develop capabilities and their implications on individual/ organizational performance.

Having examined the links between capabilities and performance, Dr. Dangol’s new research focuses on identifying obstacles (frictions) that prevent individuals from developing capabilities, and delineating the mechanisms by which capability frictions negatively influence individuals’ wellbeing. His new research will help government worldwide enact policies and invest in resources to circumvent capability frictions.

Dr. Dangol’s Fulbright-Nehru project seeks to examine the impact of violence against women (VAW) on their employment capabilities and, subsequently, economic wellbeing. Authors argue that VAW reduces women’s ability to develop employment capabilities by limiting spatial mobility. Consequently, women’s ability to secure employment essential to realize economic wellbeing is curtailed. Authors also posit that human extensibility can alleviate the adverse effects of VAW on employment capabilities by supplanting spatial mobility. This research calls for investments in human extensibility infrastructures to help women in high violence areas develop employment capabilities and realize economic wellbeing.

William Elison

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Lords of Ebb and Flow: Gods, Resources, and Access in Mumbai Slum Neighborhoods
Field of Study:	Art History
Home Institution:	Clarkson University, William Elison
Host Institution:	Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	October 2022
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Prof. William Elison studied at Williams College and received a PhD in the history of religions from the University of Chicago. He teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in Hinduism and related traditions as observed in India in the present day, mostly in vernacular languages, mostly among non-elite people.

As an urban ethnographer, he is committed to an ongoing program of research in the streets and poor neighborhoods of Mumbai. The first book-length product of this research, The Neighborhood of Gods, came out in 2018 from the University of Chicago Press. It examines how slum residents and other marginalized groups use religious images to mark and settle urban space. One of its main arguments is that sacred space is created according to a visual and somatic praxis observed across religious traditions. At the same time, it recasts, in a modern context, a question central to the history of Hindu thought: If the divine is manifest in the phenomenal world, then where and in what form do we recognize God? And with what sort of insight or authority?

Related research interests have included Adivasi (“tribal” or ST) communities; Indian slum neighborhoods and their village roots; and the mediation of darshan, or visual worship, by the movies and other technologies. From his student days, Prof. Elison has looked to Hindi popular cinema— “Bollywood”— for a window into modern Indian culture. His book on the landmark 1977 film Amar Akbar Anthony, coauthored with Christian Novetzke and Andy Rotman, was released in 2015 by Harvard University Press.

He has recently become interested in exploring the literary possibilities of ethnographic writing. His Fulbright-Nehru project this year intends to advance the next step in his fieldwork inquiry into religious life in Mumbai slum colonies.

A multisite ethnography of religious life in Mumbai slum communities. By “slum” Prof. Elison means housing consisting of unauthorized structures. Over half Mumbai’s population lives in such neighborhoods. By “religion” he means cults of local, territorial gods and divinized figures. This is a stratum of practice long associated with “village Hinduism” that Prof. Elison will demonstrate is a) observed in urban India; and b) not confined to Hindus. He will study gods as brokers of blessings and resources that flow into communities: vitality, cash, respect. Over a total of six months, Prof. Elison seeks to pursue simultaneous inquiries in three or more neighborhoods. His method is qualitative participant observation.

Umesh Garg

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Exotic Quantal Rotation in Nuclei: Chirality and Wobbling
Field of Study:	Physics
Home Institution:	University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN
Host Institution:	UGC-DAE Consortium for Scientific Research, Kolkata, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Five months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Umesh Garg, Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame, graduated from Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, and obtained a PhD in experimental nuclear physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. After postdoctoral work at the Cyclotron Institute, Texas A & M University, he joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1982.

Dr. Garg’s area of expertise is experimental nuclear physics. His current research interests include experimental investigation of compressional-mode giant resonances and exotic quantal rotation in nuclei. Some of his major accomplishments include the discovery of the isoscalar giant dipole resonance, an exotic mode of nuclear vibration, and elucidation of its properties; experimental determination of the nuclear incompressibility and the asymmetry term; first observation of longitudinal wobbling in nuclei; first observation of tidal waves in nuclei; first observation of a composite pair of chiral rotational bands, and affirmation of chirality in odd-A nuclei; and, first observation of multiple chiral bands (MχD) in nuclei. His research efforts have been truly international, involving collaborations over the years with scientists in Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, France, Finland, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for Advancement of Science. Dr. Garg was a Fulbright Specialist Awardee on Physics Education (2015-2020) and has been a JSPS (Japan) Fellow (2012) and PKU (China) Fellow (2012). He has been a consultant/visiting or adjunct professor at many universities and institutions: Argonne National Laboratory; BARC, Mumbai; GSI, Darmstadt; Peking University: Texas A & M University; TIFR, Mumbai; Xi’an Jiaotong University; and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.

Dr. Garg has served on a number of committees and boards, including the APS Committee on Governance, and the Program Committee of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics. He currently serves on the Board of Editors of the journal Progress of Theoretical and Experimental Physics.

The proposed Fulbright-Nehru project aims at enhancing collaborations with Indian scientists on investigations of chirality and wobbling in nuclei. These exotic modes of rotation are unique to triaxial nuclei—ellipsoids with all three axes unequal. Dr. Garg and his associates aims to perform measurements using the Indian National Gamma Array, a unique and truly world-class detector system, to study the band structures associated with chirality and wobbling. He also intends to give a series of lectures across India on these topics, along with some “general purpose” lectures meant to inspire students aspiring to pursue a career in physics.

Chaya Gopalan

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Introducing Flipped Teaching in Higher Education in Rural India
Field of Study:	Education
Home Institution:	Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL
Host Institution:	Rural College, Kanakapura, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Chaya Gopalan received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Bangalore University, India, and her PhD from the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She continued her research as a postdoctoral research fellow at Michigan State University. Her teaching career included a tenure-track faculty member at St. Louis Community College and St. Louis College of Pharmacy before assuming a full professor position at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE). She has been teaching anatomy, physiology, and pathophysiology at both graduate and undergraduate levels for health professional programs. Dr. Gopalan has been practicing evidence-based teaching using team-based learning, case-based learning, and, most recently, the flipped classroom methods. She has received many teaching awards, including the Arthur C. Guyton Educator of the Year award from the American Physiological Society (APS), Outstanding Two-Year College Teaching award by the National Association of Biology Teachers, and Excellence in Undergraduate Education award by SIUE. She has also received several grants, including an NSF-IUSE, an NSF-STEM Talent Expansion Program, and the APS Teaching Career Enhancement awards. Dr. Gopalan has published numerous manuscripts and case studies and contributed to several textbook chapters and question banks for textbooks and board exams. She is the author of the textbook Biology of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Diseases (Elsevier, 2022) and a frequent workshop facilitator and keynote speaker on teaching and learning in the US and abroad. Besides teaching and research, Dr. Gopalan is very active in the teaching section of the APS, where she currently serves as the Advisory Board Member of the Center for Physiology Education. Besides teaching and research, Dr. Gopalan enjoys mentoring her students and peers.

This Fulbright-Nehru proposal seeks to assess the current teaching practices in a rural college in India and subsequently provide faculty training to incorporate student-centered instructional methods such as flipped teaching in their courses and examine perceptions and intentions of faculty towards using innovative instructional strategies, faculty experiences in designing, implementing, and refining flipped teaching, and student outcomes of flipped classes. The proposed study intends to gain knowledge on student and faculty feedback on flipped instruction in a rural college in India with technological gaps. The potential and mitigating factors in implementing successful flipped teaching will aid in developing successful student-centered classrooms.

Elizabeth Kadetsky

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	On the Trail of the Seventh Mother
Field of Study:	Literature
Home Institution:	Penn State University, University Park, PA
Host Institution:	Birla Institute of Technology and Science-Pilani, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	November 2022
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Elizabeth Kadetsky is a journalist, essayist, and fiction writer whose work often explores uses of memory and the filters of perception that can influence, distort and protect it. Her explorations into nostalgia have led her to an interest in the layered significances around the topics of antiquities and patrimony. Her most recent book, The Memory Eaters, released in March 2020 and winner of the Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction, was featured in The Boston Globe, LA Review of Books, and The Rumpus and was named a top pandemic read by Buzzfeed. Her essays and short stories have been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and two Best American Short Stories notable citations, and they have appeared in The New York Times, Antioch Review, Gettysburg Review, the Nation, and elsewhere. Her other books include two works of fiction and the hybrid work of memoir and reportage First There Is a Mountain, published by Little, Brown in 2004 and re-released as an e-book by Dzanc Books in 2019. The latter came out of Ms. Kadetsky’s research as a student Fulbrighter to India during the first of her two previous Fulbright grants. She is an Associate Professor of Fiction and Nonfiction at Penn State University and a Nonfiction Editor at New England Review.

Ms. Kadetsky’s narrative nonfiction Fulbright-Nehru project follows the story of a set of Gupta era sapta matrika sculptures and their theft, export, and recognition as objects of exquisite beauty on the world stage. A work of general nonfiction, the research investigates what became of missing members of the set of sculptures, stolen from a temple in Rajasthan in 1956. A work of archival research, travel writing, history, reflection, investigative journalism, and creative nonfiction, Ms. Kadetsky’s project and its original research uses her lens as a mother and daughter to explore the layered significance of the sculptures’ journey(s) in the context of international calls for the restitution and repatriation of stolen artworks.

Aashish Kumar

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Body, Home, World: South Asian LGBTQ+ Journeys
Field of Study:	Film/Cinema Studies
Home Institution:	Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY
Host Institution:	Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	December 2022
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Aashish Kumar (he/him) is a tenured Full Professor of Television and Immersive Media in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. His areas of expertise include documentary, interactive and immersive media, participatory media, and storytelling for social change. He is also the Founding Program Director of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Immersive Media, an innovative program launched in conjunction with departments from the Schools of Communication, Engineering and Computer Science, and Humanities, Fine, and Performing Arts.

Prof. Kumar is interested in emerging media forms that use innovative storytelling strategies to help people become more aware of internal diversities and the margins of their communities. To him, such an empathic understanding is key to forming broader solidarities and bridging the gap with “the other.” He is interested in how one’s process of capturing, representing, and distributing these stories can become integral to the overall intention of the storyteller. Prof. Kumar most recently launched an interactive documentary series focusing on the gender and sexual diversity within the South Asian diaspora in North America. Titled “Body, Home, World: South Asian LGBTQ+ Journeys,” the interactive online portal centers around narratives of LGBTQ+ identifying individuals and their families, allowing the viewer to navigate between these multiple viewpoints and to gain an understanding of the uniqueness as well as the interdependence of each experience.

Dr. Kumar is the recipient of two Fulbright Specialist awards (2016 and 2019) and a Fulbright Senior Scholar award (2008). In addition to teaching courses at all levels of the television curriculum he also serves on the Advisory Board of Hofstra University’s Center for Civic Engagement and the Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Justice.

Prof. Kumar earned an MFA in Television Production from the City University of New York, Brooklyn College, an MS in Radio/TV/Film from Indiana State University, and an MA and BA (Honors) in Sociology from the University of Delhi. He resides in New York City with his wife and son and enjoys playing the guitar and learning Hindustani Classical music.

Sexual minorities in India have made significant legal gains with two recent Supreme Court decisions – one that recognizes and protects the rights of transgender people and another that ends the criminalization of homosexuality. However, most LGBTQ+ activists contend that the campaign to change hearts and minds must take place over the long-term through the humanizing and normalizing of India’s LGBTQ+ community. Through his Fulbright-Nehru grant, Prof. Kumar proposes to capture the stories of families with LGBTQ+ individuals in short documentary films and make them available through an interactive online portal. These short films will center the experience of families as well as LGBTQ+ individuals, demonstrating that allyship and advocacy go together.

Aman Luthra

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Kabariwalas and the changing nature of work in the informal economy of recycling in Delhi
Field of Study:	Geography
Home Institution:	George Washington University, Washington, DC
Host Institution:	Ambedkar University, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	January 2023
Duration of Grant:	Five months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Aman Luthra is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the George Washington University in Washington, DC where he teaches courses in political ecology, development geography, and the geography of South Asia. Prior to this position, Dr. Luthra taught in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, MI. Dr. Luthra received his PhD from the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. His research primarily focuses on the changing landscape of labor and capital in the waste management sector in urban India, with a particular focus on informal workers in this industry. In addition to research on urban waste management, Dr. Luthra is also involved in an inter- and transdisciplinary collaborative project using citizen science to understand changing patterns of pollinator diversity and abundance in and around apple orchards in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Dr. Luthra has published articles in several leading journals in geography including Antipode, Geographical Review, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space and Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.

Dr. Luthra’s Fulbright-Nehru project proposes to examine the changing nature of work in the informal recycling economy in urban Indian using mixed methods including surveys and interviews with traditional kabariwalas (buyers of recyclable materials) and new firms that that use digital technologies to try and stake a claim in this market space. In addition to contributing to scholarship on the increasing ‘platformization’ of services, Fulbright’s support for this research will not only contribute to the development of evidence-based policy prescriptions in India, it will also allow the researcher to learn from, contribute to and build long- lasting relationships at Ambedkar University, Delhi.

Rumaan Malhotra

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Death of a livestock: how dog movement translates into fear, disease, and conflict
Field of Study:	Biology
Home Institution:	University of Michigan -Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI
Host Institution:	National Center for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	February 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Rumaan Malhotra is a wildlife biologist with a background in endangered species conservation. More recently, he has been interested in the spatial ecology of human-tolerant species. Currently, he studies how various human impacts interact in their effects on native carnivores such as foxes and small wildcats. In particular, he is interested in the role of domestic dogs in driving native carnivore space usage. He earned his PhD from the University of Michigan, and his bachelor’s from Drexel University. Dr. Malhotra carried out his doctoral work in Southern Chile, where he found that agricultural landscapes were preferentially used by dogs, which affected where native foxes were found. As an avid photographer, Dr. Malhotra always has a camera in hand to document the landscapes, in which he works, and their wild inhabitants.

Dr. Malhotra aims to be studying the movement ecology of free-ranging domestic dogs in the Spiti Valley of Himachal Pradesh. He will be determining if distinct groups of dogs can be identified by their movement behavior, and if their movement corresponds with where threat of disease spillover is concentrated for humans and wildlife (specifically, rabies and canine distemper), with the spatial use of wildlife, and with livestock mortality.

Rebecca Manring

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Rūparāma Cakravartī’s Dharma-maṅgala and Performing Devotion from Precolonial Bengal to the 21st Century
Field of Study:	Art History
Home Institution:	Indiana University in Bloomington, Bloomington, IN
Host Institution:	Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	March 2023
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Rebecca Manring’s adventures in India began with no visible trajectory. Her fascination with the country led her to seek out language instruction, and she found a Bengali teacher in her home town of Seattle. After working privately with her for a year, she began to study Sanskrit as one of the perks of employment at the University of Washington. She was quickly “hooked” and gained formal admission to the graduate program in Asian Languages and Literatures in 1985. Eventually, she realized that she could earn a living working with the languages, and the culture, she had come to love. In 1996, she joined the faculty of Indiana University as the first hire, after the founding director, in its new India Studies program, where she initially taught Sanskrit and Hindi, and soon added courses in literature, cinema, and religious studies. Prof. Manring’s position converted to tenure track in 2000. She was awarded tenure in 2007 and promoted to Full Professor in 2018. Her research on hagiographical literature in premodern Bengal resulted in the publication of two books. The research for those books was largely based on unpublished manuscripts, and the search for those manuscripts led her to many unforeseen places. Most notable was the private collection of the late noted linguist Sukumar Sen. His son Subhadra Kumar Sen allowed her access to those manuscripts, and eventually, granted Prof. Manring permission to microfilm them, as they both recognized their precarious condition. As they were cleaning and cataloguing those manuscripts, they found a complete manuscript of Rūparāma Cakravartī’s Dharma-maṇgala, and made plans to complete his father’s work of critically editing the text, and then producing an English translation. The second Prof. Sen died before they could make much of a start on that project, and so in his memory and homage she has completed the translation. Now, she wants to see what the text means to the people for whom it is important, and so she is embarking upon the final phase of the work with this text, namely, this ethnographic work.

Prof. Manring’s Fulbright-Nehru project proposes to continue the exploration of the contemporary ritual applications of Rūparāma Cakravartī’s mid-17th century Dharma-maṅgala, coupled with her translation and analysis of the text, will contribute to their understanding first of the breadth of pre-modern theological anthropology of Bengal, by which she means how people lived out their rituals and devotion to their chosen deities; and second, of how those practices extend into the 21st century.

Bengali maṅgala-kāvya have much to say about non-brahminical religious praxis and illuminate our understanding of daily rural life in the pre-colonial era, providing a means for expressing non-brahmanical views and values. Moreover, the performative nature of ritual life allowed and continues to allow lower groups in the normative hierarchy a place of power and importance.

Venkateswaran Narayanaswamy

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Forest Fires – Forecast and Information through Community Sensitive Tools (FICSIT)
Field of Study:	Engineering
Home Institution:	North Carolina State University at Raleigh, Raleigh, NC
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Venkat Narayanaswamy is an Associate Professor of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at North Carolina State University. He obtained his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin and bachelor’s degree at IIT Madras, both in Aerospace Engineering. He was a postdoctoral fellow at RWTH Aachen, Germany, before joining the faculty of North Carlina State University.

Dr. Narayanaswamy’s research is in the area of combustion and aerodynamics. He focuses on complex processes of turbulent flows with emphasis on emerging clean energy and future transport. His work emphasizes advancing the current state of the art using cutting edge measurement technologies. The tools that were developed in his lab provided novel insights into the underlying flow and chemical processes that cause soot emissions. These tools will be extended to the host institution to obtain foundational understanding of the chemical processes that trigger forest fires and the aerodynamic interactions that cause the fires to spread over large geographic areas. This research can significantly advance the ability to predict the occurrence and spread of forest fires that will help develop early fire warning systems and fire probability maps that can help strategize future regional development.

Dr. Narayanaswamy has authored over 80 publications in this topical area, including an Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics article in 2014. He has been recognized with numerous research awards and honors including the AFRL Summer Faculty Fellowship (2022), AFOSR Young Investigator Award (2016), and ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowship (2016). He is also an alumnus of National Academy of Engineering’s US Frontiers of Engineering, Class of 2020. Dr. Narayanaswamy also served as an international coordinator on the SPARC award in India and is among the invitees of the VAIBHAV meet organized by the government of India.

A multiscale multi-organization research initiative is proposed to leap the current state of the art on the forecast and early warning of Indian forest fires. Dr. Narayanaswamy’s Fulbright-Nehru research aims to focus on making quantitative predictions of fire initiation probabilities and spreading rates in representative sub-Himalayan vegetation, weather, and terrain conditions. The objectives include: 1) Develop ab-initio chemical kinetics models for gasification and pyrolysis of representative organic vegetation. 2) Obtain models for crown fire initiation and spreading that are tuned for representative wind conditions and terrain. 3) Incorporate the model into in-house or commercial software and validate with existing data.

Nancy Neiman

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Women Pastoralists, Migration, Community Welfare, and Food Sovereignty during Covid
Field of Study:	Political Science
Home Institution:	Scripps College, Claremont, CA
Host Institution:	Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat
Grant Start Month:	December 2022
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Nancy Neiman has been a Professor of Politics at Scripps College since 1994. She has won numerous teach, scholarship and community service awards. She has taught a wide range of political economy courses including, Markets and Politics in Latin America, the Power Elite: Surveying the Influence of Business over Public Policy, and Infrastructures of Justice. Prof. Neiman teaches a Political Economy of Food course through which she has organized a number of community engagement projects that bridge theory and practice among which are a social enterprise organized with women who were formerly incarcerated, a program called Plant Justice with students at an alternative high school, and a Meatless Monday program that brings students and women who were formerly incarcerated together to share prepare and share meals and food justice programming. She also teaches Napier intergenerational learning courses and Inside-Out courses inside a local prison. Her most recent book, Markets, Community and Just infrastructures, includes a variety of case studies, including an interfaith coffee cooperative in Uganda, Cuban financial reform, globalization in Juárez Mexico, and the US meatpacking industry, to provide a framework for understanding the conditions under which markets promote or undermine social justice.

Focusing on pastoralist women in Gujarat India, the Fulbright-Nehru project of Prof. Neiman intends to track several key coping strategies and practices during Covid-19 among Gujarati pastoralist communities during the pandemic: the struggle over access to grazing lands and the ability to maintain traditional livelihoods, access to healthcare, navigating women’s traditional roles and their role as leaders, and promoting agrarian citizenship. Using qualitative data analysis gathered from interviews and quantitative ARCGIS survey data tracking pastoralist migratory patterns and community welfare, this project hypothesizes that pastoralist identities in Gujarat support, and are supported by, a broader transformational food sovereignty movement.

Christian Novetzke

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	A Flower of Fire: Religion, Caste, and Gender in the poetry of Savitribai Phule (1831-1897)
Field of Study:	Art History
Home Institution:	University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Host Institution:	Savitribai Phule Pune University, Mangaluru, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	February 2023
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Christian Novetzke received a BA from Macalester College, an MTS from Harvard University, and a PhD from Columbia University. Prof. Novetzke is Professor of South Asia Studies, Religious Studies, and Global Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is also Professor of the Comparative History of Ideas at UW. Prof. Novetzke’s books include The Quotidian Revolution (Columbia University Press 2016) and Religion and Public Memory (Columbia University Press 2008). He is also the co-author (with Andy Rotman and William Elison) of Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation (Harvard University Press 2016) and co-editor (with Jack Hawley and Swapna Sharma) Of Bhakti and Power (University of Washington Press 2019). Among his awards, Prof. Novetzke was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018 and a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow in 2013. His current projects include a book on yoga as political theory and practice with co-author Sunila S. Kale (under contract at Columbia University Press) and a book on the thought of Savitribai Phule, for which he was awarded the current Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship.

Savitribai Phule was born into an impoverished subaltern caste of Shudra agricultural workers in India in 1831. She became one of the first Shudra women in India to receive an education. She authored two books of political poetry in Marathi, each articulating her powerful vision for social justice and her fight against caste patriarchy. Her ideas about religion, caste, gender, and power made her one of the most important critical thinkers in Indian history. However, Savitribai Phule is hardly known outside of India. With Fulbright-Nehru’s support Prof. Novetzke hopes to complete his research on a book on the critical thought of Savitribai Phule.

Sharolyn Pollard-Durodola

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Primary Grade Multilingualism in India through a Historical Ethnographic Lens (Project PGM)
Field of Study:	Education
Home Institution:	University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV
Host Institution:	Deccan College, Mangaluru, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Sharolyn Pollard-Durodola is a Professor in the English Language Learning program in the Department of Early Childhood, Multilingual, and Special Education, in the College of Education at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. She received a BA degree in Romance Languages from Mount Holyoke College, a MAT from Columbia-Teachers College, an MS in Developmental and Remedial Reading from City College of New York, and an EdD in Curriculum and Development with an emphasis in Second Language Acquisition from the University of Houston. Her scholarship attends to the language and literacy development of multilingual students. Central to her scholarship is developing school-based interventions, evaluating their impact on the language and conceptual knowledge development of PK-3 multilingual learners and investigating how to improve the quality of language practices that are embedded in subject area instruction (e.g., science, social studies). She has been the co-principal investigator on two IES grants titled Words of Oral Reading and Language Development, focusing on preschool language/literacy development and is the co-principal investigator for Project E3: Enhancing, Engaging, and Empowering Teachers for the Next Generation of English Learners funded by The Office of English Language Acquisition (OLEA), National Professional Development Program. She was also the Senior Researcher (Nevada) for the multi-site Project International Consortium for Multilingual Excellence in Education (ICMEE), also a National Professional Development Grant funded by OELA. These OELA grants focus on supporting general education teachers of multilingual learners via professional development approaches (e.g., eLearning, Saturday Advanced Professional Learning Institutes, My Teaching Partner coaching) with attention to the influence of teacher beliefs and attitudes on their instructional practices. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Early Education and Development, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, The Elementary School Journal, Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, The Reading Teacher, and Bilingual Research Journal.

In 2019, Dr. Pollard-Durodola traveled through India, noting its multilingual presence, which inspired her to consider how Indian teachers are able to promote multilingual learning during the early primary school years in a country where many languages, mother tongues, and dialects are spoken. She investigates how beliefs (teachers, school administrators, parents) about multilingualism (e.g., learning English, Hindi, Mother Tongue) may influence the implementation of India’s Three Language Model priorities and how the history of India’s language education policies may provide insights about current tensions. This Fulbright-Nehru projects seeks to provide insights about the factors that contribute to or hinder early childhood multilingualism in similar global settings where immigration patterns challenge educational systems to promote linguistic equity.

Sumathi Ramaswamy

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Dying to Give: Pachaiyappa Mudaliar and the Birth of Educational Philanthropy in Tamil India
Field of Study:	Energy
Home Institution:	Duke University, Durham, NC
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Madras, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	October 2022
Duration of Grant:	Eight months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Sumathi Ramaswamy is James B. Duke Professor of History, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. She has published extensively on language politics, gender studies, spatial studies and the history of cartography, visual studies and the modern history of art, and more recently, digital humanities and the history of philanthropy in modern India. She holds a master’s degree in History and MPhil in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; a Master’s in Anthropology from University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in History from the University of California (Berkeley). Prior to her appointment at Duke Univeristy, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Between 2002 and 2005, she also worked for the Ford Foundation in New Delhi as Program Officer for Education, Arts and Culture. Her monographs include Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India (1997); The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (2004); The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (2010), Husain’s Raj: Postcolonial Visions of Empire and Nation (2016); and Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe (2017). She is a co-founder of Tasveerghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture. Her most recent works are Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience (New Delhi: Roli Books), a digital project on children’s art titled B is for Bapu: Gandhi in the Art of the Child in Modern India, and a co-edited volume (with Monica Juneja) titled Motherland: Pushpamala N.’s Woman and Nation (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2022). She is currently working on a new project on educational philanthropy in British India.

Focusing on India’s first educational trust named Pachaiyappa’s Charities and on its connection to the man after whom it is named, Pachaiyappa Mudaliar (d. 1794), Prof. Ramaswamy’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to chart the birth of educational philanthropy in nineteenth-century Tamil India. She analyzes the emergence of secular education as a desirable public good; the transformation in the age of colonial capital of ancestral ideas about virtuous giving; and the political, economic, and ethical motivations for philanthropic support for secular education. She also considers questions endemic to philanthropy about power and personal influence as she delineates the role of private wealth in underwriting public education.

Mondira Ray

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Harnessing the Power of Electronic Health Records to Improve Maternal and Child Health
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	At-Large, Pittsburgh, PA
Host Institution:	Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	January 2023
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Mondira Ray is a pediatrician and aspiring health informatician. After studying economics and religion at Swarthmore College, her fascination with human behavior and societal structures culminated in a career path to medicine. She completed the pre-medical requirements at Bryn Mawr College’s Postbaccalaureate Pre-Medical Program, received her Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and recently graduated from pediatric residency at the University of Washington in 2022. Through several prestigious research training awards, she has developed expertise in computational biology and data science, and is passionate about improving the accessibility and usability of health data to improve the health of children, particularly in marginalized communities. After her Fulbright-Nehru project, she plans to attend a fellowship in Clinical Informatics.

Although India has made progress in improving its staggering rates of maternal and child mortality and morbidity, wide regional variation remains. Key to addressing these disparities is the digitalization of health records. At this time, only a fraction of primary care centers in India uses an electronic health record (EHR). The primary aims of Dr. Ray’s Fulbright-Nehru project are to support the continued evolution of EHR and to develop a resource to help community health organizations adopt their own EHR platform.

Devendra Sharma

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Researching the History and Potential of North India’s Endangered Swang-Nautanki Folk Opera Tradition
Field of Study:	Communication and Performance
Home Institution:	California State University- Fresno, Fresno, CA
Host Institution:	Birla Institute of Technology and Science-Pilani, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	October 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Devendra Sharma, is a Professor of Communication and Performance at California State University-Fresno. He is also a seventh-generation performer of Swang, Nautanki, and Raaslila, the traditional musical theater genres of northern India. He has given more than 1000 performances worldwide and has acted in and directed many films and television programs. His ancestors made “Rahas” musical theatre popular at Awadh’s Nawab (King) Wajid Ali Shah’s court in the mid 1800s. Dr. Sharma’s artistic mission is to use the indigenous performing arts to bring critical attention to contemporary global issues.

In 2021, Dr. Sharma received the largest commission in the traditional arts ever in the US from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to create a contemporary Nautanki opera. In 2010, he was invited by the world-famous Théâtre du Soleil in Paris to train French actors in Nautanki. His directed musical, “Hanuman Ki Ramayan” was premiered at Prithvi Theater in Mumbai, completing its 100 shows in August 2018. Dr. Sharma introduced Swang-Nautanki to America and Europe, where he created a Nautanki troupe, and has directed many productions.

Dr. Sharma has written numerous book chapters and journal articles. His forthcoming book titled, Nautanki: The Musical Theatre of North India will be published by Bloomsbury Publishing, England in 2023. His latest article comparing Ramlila and Nautanki was published in Asian Theatre Journal in 2021. Dr. Sharma has been a Visiting Professor/ Artist in Residence at institutions across the world such as University of Oxford, Columbia University, University of California-Berkeley, Film and Television Institute of India, and Banaras Hindu University, among many others.

In 2007-08, Dr. Sharma was the Chief Creative Consultant to the United Nations Joint Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) in India. In this capacity, he designed a folk media communication campaign to spread awareness on HIV/AIDS. From 1999-2004, he helped Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Programs to create a massive folk media campaign for women’s empowerment and health in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. As part of the campaign, Dr. Sharma trained more than 150 folk troupes to stage more than 10,000 folk performances. His artistic website is www.devnautanki.com.

Swang-Nautanki (north India’s traditional opera) is dying along with its “akhārās” (community-based competitive performance groups) due to the media invasion. The goal of Dr. Sharma’s Fulbright-Nehru project is to achieve the urgently-needed documentation of Swang-Nautanki akhārās, hand-written and published scripts, performances, and the aging master-performers. His research also aims to understand how Swang-Nautanki is functioning as a communication medium for Indian villagers in the 21st century. To understand this, Dr. Sharma intends to collaborate with the local community in Mathura and the areas nearby to encourage a local troupe to create a Swang-Nautanki performance piece on a contemporary issue of their choice.

Huaixiang Tan

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Research on 'Indian Classical Dance Costume Design and Construction'
Field of Study:	Drama/Theater Arts
Home Institution:	University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL
Host Institution:	University of Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	March 2023
Duration of Grant:	Four and half months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Huaixiang Tan (previous Tan Huaixiang, prefer Tan) is a Full Professor in Costume and Makeup Design and Technology in the Theatre Department, School of Performing Arts, at University of Central Florida, in Orlando, Florida. She holds an MFA degree in Costume Design from Utah State University and a BFA degree from the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing.

Besides teaching, Prof. Tan enjoys designing costume/makeup for departmental theatre productions and professional theatres. Her costume designs were recognized by the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Region IV for the Meritorious Achievement Award – Excellence in Costume Design, Outstanding Teaching Artist, and Distinguished Achievement in Costume Design. Prof. Tan’s professional credits include the works Three River Shakespeare Festival in Pittsburgh, PA; Historic Liberty Theatre in Washington, WA; Orlando Repertory Theatre, FL; The Lambs players Theatre, San Diego, CA; and Department of Theatre, Film & Dance, at Cornell University.

Prof. Tan is an author of two books Character Costume Figure Drawing 3rd edition in 2018, and Costume Craftwork on a Budget 2nd edition 2019, published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, New York and London. The Character Costume Figure Drawing 3rd edition was published in Spanish by Grupo Anaya, S.A. Madrid, Spain 2019. Prof. Tan is a member of United Scenic Artists, local 829.

Prof. Tan has a great passion for Indian dance costumes and makeup. Her Fulbright-Nehru research seeks to focus on participation by direct observation, interaction, and hands-on practice involved in the creative process to learn different types of classical dance costume/makeup design, material, and construction. The research also intends to also provide firsthand knowledge of dance costume styles and construction techniques from local professionals’ original works. Writing a book on Indian dance costume will provide opportunities to introduce and promote Indian dance costume art to the world.

Lumina Albert

Lumina S Albert

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Researching and Teaching ‘Global Business Ethics’ and the Human Rights Impact of Business in India
Field of Study:	Business
Home Institution:	Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO
Host Institution:	Anna University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Lumina Albert is an Associate Professor of Business Ethics and Management, a Daniels Ethics Fellow, and the OtterBox Faculty Fellow in the College of Business at Colorado State University. She also serves as the Executive Director of the CSU Center for Ethics and Human Rights. Her research seeks to extend knowledge of social justice, ethical behavior, and interpersonal relationships in the business world. She has an MBA (with a dual specialization in Marketing and Human Resource Management) and a PhD in Business Management. Following her doctoral studies, Dr. Albert received the prestigious AAUW International Postdoctoral Fellowship to continue her research at the Department of Psychology at Stanford University and at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. She is an award-winning teacher and has been honored with the College of Business Excellence in Teaching Award and the ‘Best Teacher of Colorado State University’ Award, which is given to outstanding educators at CSU by the CSU Alumni Association and Student Alumni Connection. Her research has been published in scholarly journals such as Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Business Ethics, Human Resource Management Review, Organizational Psychology Review and Group & Organizations Management. Dr. Albert’s service at CSU and to the Northern Colorado Community has been recognized with the College of Business Outstanding Service Award, CSU Multicultural Distinguished Service Award, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Office of International Programs at CSU. She has served as a consultant with organizations such as Procter & Gamble, International Justice Mission, and Child Relief & You (CRY) on issues ranging from strategic public relations to organizing social marketing campaigns. She serves on the Board of Advisors of New Horizons House, an international organization providing holistic restoration for survivors of human trafficking and sexual abuse. She is also a central organizer of the Northern Colorado Human Trafficking Symposium, a premier and distinctive conference that seeks to engage and educate on the issue of human trafficking through research, training, and collaboration. In her spare time, Dr. Albert enjoys cooking for her friends and family, interior designing, and traveling around the world!

The proposed Fulbright-Nehru project focuses on the ethics and human rights impact of corporates on people and communities in India. The project intends to examine the macro- and micro- level aspects of the ethics and human rights practices of global business organizations. Specifically, this research utilizes a norms-based framework to assess how corporate ethics practices impact the emergence of individual behaviors and community outcomes. Areas of research and teaching include how these businesses impact their stakeholders (i.e., consumers, employees, workers, the environment, and the community in which they operate).

Jill Belsky

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Building Environmental/Conservation Social Science Capacity in India
Field of Study:	Sociology
Home Institution:	University of Montana, Missoula, MT
Host Institution:	Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, Uttarakhand
Grant Start Month:	February 2023
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Jill Belsky is Professor Emerita from the University of Montana (UM) where she was a faculty member for 30 years, serving as Chair in the Departments of Sociology and Society and Conservation — the latter an interdisciplinary department in the College of Forestry and Conservation in which she was a founding member. She served as Director of the Bolle Center for People and Forests at UM, and as Editor-in-Chief of her discipline’s flagship journal, Society and Natural Resources. Dr. Belsky received her PhD from Cornell University in 1991 in Rural Sociology with specializations in natural resources, agriculture and southeast studies. She is a nationally and locally award-winning instructor, teaching highly popular classes in society, environment and development, international conservation and development, and political ecology. Her research has been widely published, and focusses on the intersections of rural livelihoods, economy, community-based natural resources and wildlife management, and the political economy of development, conducted often in collaboration with ecological scientists, managers and practitioners across South and Southeast Asia and the US west. She enjoys hiking, Nordic skiing and biking, as well as traveling and staying in mountain villages around the world.

Dr. Belsky’s Fulbright-Nehru project seeks to enhance environmental social science capacity in India through linking interactive and innovative teaching with participant action research (PAR). Both dimensions are informed by social-ecological theory and practice, and cultural/political ecology. The PAR project will collectively address human-wildlife conflicts and livelihood challenges in the Harsil Valley of Uttarakhand. PAR methodology utilizes inclusive, mixed methods to gather data relevant to a range of constituents to develop mutually-beneficial policy and programs, and context-specific, relevant content for class lectures, curriculum development and a workshop at the Wildlife Institute of India.

Swasti Bhattacharyya

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Sarvodaya – A Path of Justice, Peace, and Wholeness for All
Field of Study:	Religious Studies/Applied Ethics
Home Institution:	Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA
Host Institution:	Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh
Grant Start Month:	January 2023
Duration of Grant:	Eight months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Swasti Bhattacharyya (PhD, RN) has taught Philosophy and Religion for over 20 years. She was Visiting Professor Emerita of Women’s Studies and Ethics and a 2021-2022 WSRP Research Associate at the Harvard Divinity School. Her current long-term ethnographic project explores how current generations are living out Vinoba Bhave’s (Gandhi’s disciple, friend, confidant, and spiritual successor) commitments to Sarvodaya (the holistic uplifting of all life). Her latest publication, “Shiva’s Babies: Hindu Perspectives on the Treatment of High-Risk Newborn Infants” in Religion and Ethics in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (Oxford University Press, 2019) and her book Magical Progeny, Modern Technology (SUNY, 2006) combine her experiences as a registered nurse with her expertise in ethics and the study of religion. Dr. Bhattacharyya is the current Director of the Uberoi Teacher Training Workshop – U.S. She also serves on the advisory board for the Center for Understanding World Religions (Loma Linda University), the American Academy of Religion’s Committee on the Status of Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession, and on the board of the Peace and Justice Studies Association.

Dr. Bhattacharyya’s Fulbright-Nehru project intends to explore the lives and work of the Sisters of the Brahma Vidya Mandir Ashram and three generations of people working for Sarvodaya. Coined by M. K. Gandhi and developed by his disciple, confidant, and spiritual successor Vinoba Bhave, Sarvodaya calls for the holistic uplifting of all life. Dr Bhattacharyya brings the stories and insights of those working for a better world, demonstrates their relevance in multiple contexts, and argues that worldviews grounded in Sarvodaya can bring radical ways of addressing contemporary global challenges, and working for a more just, compassionate, and loving world.

Thomas Boving

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Advancing Hydrogeological Remediation Science and Engineering by Teaching and Research in India
Field of Study:	Engineering
Home Institution:	The University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI
Host Institution:	IIT Roorkee, Roorkee, Uttarakhand
Grant Start Month:	January 2023
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Thomas Boving is a Professor of Hydrogeology at the University of Rhode Island, USA. Born in Germany, he studied Geology at the University of Tübingen, Germany. After receiving his PhD in Hydrology and Water Resources from the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA, in 1999, he joined the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, USA, where he maintains a joint appointment in the Department of Geosciences and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Dr. Boving is as an expert in the field of soil and groundwater remediation and is the co-author of the leading textbook in his field. He published over 80 work products, including peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and a book. His work is cited over 5,000 times. Dr. Boving’s research focuses on the fate and transport of legacy and emerging contaminants and their remediation, using novel treatment technologies. He also researches sustainable, community operated water treatment systems, such as riverbank filtrations technology, and their application in underserved rural areas in emerging economies. Besides his work in the US, he collaborates with researchers in North Africa and, for over 15 years, with NGOs and academic institutions in India, Nepal, and Indonesia. He currently serves on several boards of water research and management organizations and directs his university’s Graduate Certificate in Hydrology program. Outside his academic work, Dr. Boving enjoys building wooden furniture and traveling with his family.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Boving seeks to teach and conduct research in hydrogeological remediation science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee, India. Remediation science and engineering in hydrogeology focuses on technologies and practices for the efficient and economic clean-up of polluted (ground)water. Starting in early 2023, Dr. Boving intends to teach the science and engineering fundamentals of groundwater remediation while also collaborating with faculty and students on innovative remediation technology research projects. A key beneficial outcome would be establishing the Department of Civil Engineering at IIT as a hotspot for hydrogeological remediation teaching and research in India.

Chaya Gopalan

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Introducing Flipped Teaching in Higher Education in Rural India
Field of Study:	Education
Home Institution:	Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL
Host Institution:	Rural College, Kanakapura, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Narayanan Kuthirummal

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Introducing Nanotechnology and Materials Characterization Techniques to Students in Farook College
Field of Study:	Physics
Home Institution:	College of Charleston, Charleston, SC
Host Institution:	Farook College, Kozhikode, Kerala
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Narayanan Kuthirummal is a physics professor and most of his academic career has been spent at the College of Charleston (CofC) having around 10,000 students with about 5% graduate students. He is currently on his second term as Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at CofC. Dr. Kuthirummal follows a teacher-scholar model and his current experiences and skill sets include developing effective teaching strategies, developing degree programs (undergraduate and graduate), promoting experiential learning, recruitment, promoting diversity, and developing connections with industries. He received his PhD in Physics from Banaras Hindu University, India. Before joining CofC in 2004, Dr. Kuthirummal spent about three years at Brown University (USA) as a Postdoctoral Associate and about five years as postdoctoral fellow at Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Dr. Kuthirummal’s research interests include nanomaterials for energy applications, composite polymer materials for medical applications, and nondestructive evaluation techniques applied to nanomaterials. He has mentored 30 undergraduate research students and published 53 peer-reviewed publications in international journals and about 55 abstracts in national/international conferences. He received the Distinguished Teacher Award of CofC, Norine Noonan Sustained Achievement Award of the School of Sciences and Mathematics, Excellence in Collegiate Education and Leadership (ExCEL) Awards: Outstanding Faculty of the Year for the School of Sciences and Mathematics of the College of Charleston, and is a member of the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society.

The objective of the proposed Fulbright-Nehru project is to engage students and faculty at Farook College in nanotechnology and nanomaterials characterization using nondestructive evaluation methods through a combination of teaching and research with emphasis on graphene-based nanocomposites. The research component of the proposed project includes synthesis and characterization of modified graphene nanocomposite materials. As part of the proposal, a course on “Nanotechnology and Advanced Nondestructive Evaluation Methods” will be developed and taught following a student-centered approach. Students will be introduced to the process of research through data analysis, interpretation, and to developing research questions and writing scientific proposals.

Amal Mitra

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Psychological Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic among Adolescents in West Bengal, India
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	Jackson State University, Jackson, MS
Host Institution:	Presidency University, Kolkata, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	February 2023
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Amal Mitra is a Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Jackson State University (JSU), Jackson, MS, USA. He obtained his Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) and Master of Public Health (MPH) degrees from University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL. He received his Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) degree from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Prior to joining JSU, he worked as a senior medical officer and associate scientist at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research (icddrb), Bangladesh, where he started his research career in clinical medicine as well as in public health. Dr. Mitra is a recipient of external funding from numerous agencies including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of Agriculture (DOA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Susan G. Komen Foundation, the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC). He is also a recipient of many awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award 2013, the Innovation Award for Applied Research 2004, and the Distinguished Faculty Researcher Award 1999.

Dr. Mitra’s Fulbright-Nehru research project focuses on adolescents’ mental health in relation to COVID-19. Demographic data, family history of COVID-19, and any other physical and mental illnesses of the participants (such as depression, anxiety, behavioral changes, sleep disturbances, and addictions) will be collected. The participants will be screened for mental health status using Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ)-9 and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)-7 scales. The overall impact of human losses due to COVID-19 in West Bengal will be assessed. In addition, Dr. Mitra will offer a graduate-level course on Epidemiology of COVID-19, and hands-on training on statistical analysis of data.

Kathleen Mulligan

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Preserving the Vanishing Stories of Partition
Field of Study:	Theatre Arts
Home Institution:	Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY
Host Institution:	Khalsa College, Amritsar, Punjab
Grant Start Month:	December 2022
Duration of Grant:	Six and half months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Kathleen Mulligan is a Professor of voice and speech in the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance at Ithaca College. She is a member of Actors Equity Association, the union of professional actors. She earned her BFA in acting from Boston University and her MFA in Performance from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. In 2010, Prof. Mulligan was a Fulbright grantee to Kerala, India with her project Finding Women’s Voices, focused on the empowerment of women through voice. This led to a Fulbright Specialist grant to Pakistan, where she first considered the idea of creating an original theatre piece about Partition. In 2015, a U.S. Embassy grant allowed Prof. Mulligan and her husband, Actor and Director David Studwell, to collaborate with Islamabad’s Theatre Wallay on the project Voices of Partition, drawing on interviews with Partition survivors to devise the original play Dagh Dagh Ujala (This Stained Dawn.) Dagh Dagh Ujala opened in Islamabad and toured to the .U.S with stops in Boston, Ithaca, and the US Department of State in Washington DC before returning home for closing performances in Lahore. In 2017, Mulligan and Studwell again joined with Theatre Wallay along with U.S. playwright Linda Alper for a new project titled On Common Ground. This original piece, exploring the effect of violence on public space, toured to the western US with stops at Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, OR and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. It then returned home to perform in several cities across Pakistan. Prof. Mulligan’s acting career has brought her to every state in the US, performing such roles as Prospero in The Tempest, Jocasta in Oedipus, Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Lucy in Sweeney Todd. Most recently, she traveled to Beirut, Lebanon to perform her one-woman show The Belle of Amherst (written by William Luce and based on the life of New England poet Emily Dickinson) as a guest of the American University in Beirut. She is eager to continue offering this performance to audiences in India and around the globe.

The partition of India and Pakistan resulted in the death of over one million and caused the largest forced migration the world has ever seen. History books tell the stories of leaders and governments that brought about Partition—but little of the people whose lives were lost or changed forever. Drawing on interviews with survivors and their families, Prof. Mulligan intends to work with young people through her Fulbright-Nehru project to create an original theatre piece that preserves the human stories of Partition. By experiencing live theatre, whether as creators or audience members, young people in India will connect with the stories of those who came before them to better understand themselves and the world they live in.

Nancy Neiman

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Women Pastoralists, Migration, Community Welfare, and Food Sovereignty during Covid
Field of Study:	Political Science
Home Institution:	Scripps College, Claremont, CA
Host Institution:	Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat
Grant Start Month:	December 2022
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Jeremy Rinker

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Trauma-informed Frameworks for Inclusive Peace
Field of Study:	Philosophy
Home Institution:	University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG, Greensboro, NC
Host Institution:	Symbiosis University, Mangaluru, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	February 2023
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Jeremy Rinker is an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro’s Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, where he is currently engaged in research that explores the intersections between peacebuilding, collective trauma, and systems of oppression. Prof. Rinker graduated with a PhD from George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (now called the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution) in 2009. His masters’ degree (2001) is from the University of Hawaii in Asian Religion. He holds a bachelor’s degree (dual major, 1995) from the University of Pittsburgh in Philosophy and Political Science.

Prof. Rinker’s research and writings have long focused on South Asian communities, untouchability, human rights, and narrative meaning making in identity-based social justice movements. His past work emphasizes the skills and practices of nonviolent conflict transformation in social justice movements decision making processes, justice advocacy, and identity formation. With background and expertise in restorative justice conferencing, program development, narrative analysis, and social movement organization, Prof. Rinker is also the editor of the Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis, an innovative new journal of peaceful social exploration and human flourishing. Prof. Rinker’s past publications include two books as well as academic articles in Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, Peace and Change, The Canadian Journal of Peace Research, and the Journal of Peace Education, among other scholarly outlets. Prof. Rinker was a 2013 Fulbright-Nehru awardee in Banaras, India where he taught and engaged in research through the Malviya Centre for Peace Research at Banaras Hindu University. He is currently writing a 3rd book on being trauma aware and emotionally mindful in conflict practice.

The social and psychological obstacles that past collective traumas place upon marginalized communities represents a deep intellectual lacuna in the social scientific understanding of structural violence (Galtung, 1969) and conflict transformation (Lederach, 1997, 2005). Only recently has the emerging field of peace and conflict studies (PCS) begun to take the embodiment of trauma in collectives seriously as an important dynamic variable in social conflict. Much work remains to be done to center collective trauma in our understanding of sustainable peace. As a result, marginalized communities continue to suffer persistent systemic and structural violence and indifference to their unique pasts. This gap in the research and practice literature represents a critical opportunity space for developing unique community engaged peacebuilding interventions which value unique identity differences. This is the seedbed of democracy, and Prof. Rinker’s research and teaching as a 2022-23 Fulbright-Nehru awardee would provide the space and structure to envision a more inclusive framework for trauma-informed peacebuilding while in the context of the world’s largest democracy.

Research on the diverse Indian social system provides unique opportunities to build awareness about collective historical trauma and solidarities with marginalized identities and communities in the United States, and elsewhere. The post-colonial context of modern Indian society can be described as a petri dish for this type of work. Prof. Rinker’s Fulbright-Nehru project seeks to engage both in-person and with B.R. Ambedkar archives at Symbiosis University (SU) to develop a trauma-informed framework for indigenous and inclusive peace practice. His previous work on identity, rights, and narrative awareness (Rinker, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2013, 2009) raises a rich set of comparative qualitative questions about the important connections between protracted social conflict, memory, and collective historical trauma. Prof. Rinker’s proposed Fulbright-Nehru project aims to outline what inclusive peace would look like in a heterogeneous society with competing identities and communities. In developing a trauma-informed lens for both understanding and nonviolently engaging social exclusion, this work aims to map potential solidarities among social justice and human rights social movements. Symbiosis University’s (SU’s) strong reputation in the social sciences provides an ideal mooring for this theory building research and teaching practice. Being able to collaboratively collect data and teach alongside social scientists and critical liberal arts thinkers will allow him to develop a grounded theory framework for trauma-informed peacebuilding. In developing his critical pedagogy through teaching Indian undergraduate students in peace and conflict resolution studies, his research and teaching will reinforce each other. Through teaching, interviews, and a series of workshops/focus circles developed in partnership with Symbiosis University, the Manuski Center (a human rights center also located in Pune), and the Ambedkar Museum and Memorial, Prof. Rinker will inductively explore the role collective trauma in developing peace praxis. With this proposed Nehru-Fulbright award he hopes to share an action science-oriented research experience at SU’s Center for International Education (SCIE), the Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Museum and Memorial, and the Department of Conflict Resolution Studies. This experience will allow Prof. Rinker to both collect data and engage in archival research of India’s rich civil society and social movement history.

Elizabeth Simon

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Curricular Initiatives for Improving Professional Visibility and Social Image of Indian Nurses
Field of Study:	Nursing
Home Institution:	Nyack College, New York, NY
Host Institution:	Global Institute of Public Health, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala
Grant Start Month:	October 2022
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Elizabeth Simon RN, PhD, ANP-BC, has over 25 years of academic nursing experience and over 30 years of clinical experience. She had served in the capacity of Staff Nurse, Staff Development Instructor, Program Coordinator, Director, and Dean. She was also appointed as a Critical Care Nursing Consultant for the Corporate Nursing Services of the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation (NYCHHC). Dr. Simon is also a board-certified Adult Health Nurse Practitioner. She has authored and reviewed books on Critical Care Nursing, book chapters on transcultural issues, edited a book on non-communicable diseases, published many articles in peer reviewed journals and periodicals in the US and India. She has presented at various national and international forums. Dr. Simon was a Fulbright-Nehru Academic Excellence Scholar during 2015-16 academic years. Her academic degrees include BSc (N) from College of Nursing, Christian Medical College, Ludhiana, Punjab University; MS in Critical care nursing from the School of Nursing, Columbia University; EdM. in Nursing Education from Teachers College; MS in Adult Health Nurse Practitioner from Hunter College, and PhD in higher education from Walden University. She was an LANP fellow of American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

The proposed Fulbright-Nehru project intends to implement three specialized nursing programs. A US model of specialized education for graduate nurses as Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) to provide care to the rape trauma victims. A second area of special training in Critical care transport nursing to solve the lack of a systematic prehospital care. Men in Nursing will be utilized to fulfill this advance role. A third curriculum introduced will be Home Hospice and Palliative Care Nursing. The Indian Nursing Council (INC) will oversee and guide implementation of these proposed programs.

J.P Singh

J.P. Singh

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technologies and India's Export Prospects
Field of Study:	International Relations
Home Institution:	George Mason University, Arlington, VA
Host Institution:	Indian Institute for Foreign Trade, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Dr. J.P. Singh is Professor of International Commerce and Policy at the Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University, and Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow with the Robert Bosch Academy, Berlin. Previously, he was Chair and Professor of Culture and Political Economy, and Director of the Institute for International Cultural Relations at the University of Edinburgh.

Prof. Singh has published 10 books and over 100 articles. His latest books are: Cultural Values in Political Economy (2020), and Sweet Talk: Paternalism and Collective Action in North-South Trade Negotiations (Stanford, 2017). His book Globalized Arts: The Entertainment Economy and Cultural Identity (Columbia, 2011) won the American Political Science Association’s award for best book in information technology and politics in 2012. His current book project is Development 2.0: How Technologies Can Foster Inclusivity in the Developing World (Oxford, forthcoming). He has worked with international organizations such as UNESCO, the World Bank, and the WTO, and played a leadership role in several professional organizations. He is Founding Editor of the journal Arts and International Affairs. Previously he was Editor of Review of Policy Research, the journal specializing in the politics and policy of science and technology. Awards in 2022 include a $1.39 million grant from the Minerva program (as Principal Investigator), Distinguished Scholar in International Communication award from the International Studies Association, and Outstanding Scholar Award from the Schar.

He has taught at Scripps College (Claremont), University of Mississippi, American University, Georgetown University, School of Advanced International Studies – Johns Hopkins University, and George Mason University. Outside of the United States, he has taught at the University of Edinburgh, Graduate Institute – Geneva (IHEID), University of Siena, and University of Jyväskylä. He holds a PhD in Political Economy and Public Policy from the University of Southern California, an MA from Mumbai.

How are India’s export industries adopting artificial intelligence technologies to compete in the global economy? Can AI enhance Indian exports just as Information technologies did a generation ago? Prof. Singh’s Fulbright-Nehru project in India seeks to conduct research on the Indian policy and business landscape for AI technology adoption in export industries, while also presenting teaching modules on related topics of technology, diplomacy, and international commerce.

Jamie Barber

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching)
Project Title:	Throughways: Building Connections Between Science Communication and the Arts
Field of Study:	Writing
Home Institution:	University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY
Host Institution:	National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	January 2023
Duration of Grant:	Seven months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Jamie Barber holds a position in the academic and professional writing program at the University at Buffalo where she also served as the interim director of the Journalism Certificate Program in 2021-2022. Prof. Barber’s work in the classroom aims to decenter concepts of “normal” in order to invite students to leverage their diverse backgrounds and abilities as they develop their writing skills. She recently taught a class titled “Writing for Change” in which students learned research and writing skills while trying to enact change on a real-world problem that intersected with their interests and identities. These writing students extended the impact of their writing and learning by creating multimodal “campaigns” to get the word out about their change-making ideas. Students created activist-centered zines, podcasts, infographics, and other documents that extended beyond text-based communication. Prof. Barber is currently co-designing a first-year writing course in which students will explore their language backgrounds while speculating on what linguistic justice might look like in academic and professional writing contexts.

Prof. Barber’s creative work often focuses on interactions between humans and the more-than-human world. Her essay “The Trouble with Cockroaches” explores tension between a “do-no-harm” attitude and a cockroach infestation. Her essay “Accepting Impermanence” speculates that ancient people may have advice for a new mother. Prof. Barber is also developing her journalism portfolio, recently writing about earthquake research for Temblor, and about the Buffalo, NY community for Buffalo Rising.

Prof. Barber’s Fulbright-Nehru project seeks to build a collaborative framework between students, educators, artists, designers, and scientists. She plans to work with the Science Gallery Bengaluru, an institution already engaged in powerful connections between the arts and the sciences, to build workshops that will connect students to this collaborative framework. Students will learn science while they engage in multimodal science communication projects.

Anita Charles

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching)
Project Title:	Progressive Education in India
Field of Study:	Education
Home Institution:	Bates College, Lewiston, ME
Host Institution:	Fergusson Colleg, Mangaluru, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	January 2023
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Anita Charles is Director of Teacher Education and Senior Lecturer at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine. In the past, she has taught a wide variety of ages and abilities, from first graders through adult learners, including more than ten years as a high school English teacher.

Dr. Charles has conducted many workshops on a wide range of topics, including autism, special education, digital literacies, and teaching methodologies.

As a Fulbright Scholar in India in 2016, Dr. Charles taught undergraduates and explored issues of literacy and inclusion in pre-K-12 schools. Subsequently, she engaged in research on inclusive education for children with disabilities in India.

Dr. Charles has a PhD from University of New Hampshire in the area of Adolescent Literacy. Her dissertation on digital, social, and academic literacies won two national awards. She holds an MEd from Harvard and a BA from Dartmouth College. She has published numerous articles as well as several book chapters. In 2019, she also appeared on a nationally televised ABC news special with Diane Sawyer entitled “Screentime.”

For her Fulbright-Nehru grant, Dr. Charles plans to present on topics related to teacher education, literacy, inclusion and diversity, and/or similar areas of expertise. Her philosophy is based in progressive theory, which promotes a student’s learning process as one of teacher-student interaction, discovery, and growth, through a recognition of social and cultural contexts. In India, a number of initiatives strive to improve educational opportunities, processes, and outcomes for all children. In addition to teaching, she hopes to assist a host institution in curriculum/program development, participate in meetings as an active member of the organization, engage in local community outreach, and give presentations or workshops.

Margaret Phillips

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching)
Project Title:	Developing Experiential Training & Education Models: Paralegal Interns and Legal Clinics in Delhi
Field of Study:	Law
Home Institution:	Daemen University, Amherst, NY
Host Institution:	National Law University, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	February 2023
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Margaret Phillips is a paralegal educator, lawyer, writer and access to justice activist focused on developing experiential learning for paralegal students while promoting access to justice for under-served communities. She is currently the Director of the Paralegal Studies program at Daemen University in Buffalo, New York, and prior to that she taught Legal Research and Writing at the University of Buffalo School of law and was a civil litigator with experience in negligence, civil rights, and discrimination.

As an educator, Prof. Phillips is experienced in developing curriculum, presenting and teaching on topics ranging from social justice, legal ethics, legal research and writing, introduction to law, and legal research methods. She has presented to audiences including high school groups, paralegals, paralegal educators, practicing attorneys, and college students. She was recently selected to do a Tedx Buffalo talk “What if the Constitution Could Talk?”

As a writer, Prof. Phillis is the author of a college textbook on legal analysis and writing entitled: “A Practical Guide to Legal Research and Analysis for Paralegal and Legal Studies Students.” She also writes a regular column for the Bar Association for Erie County entitled “Spotlight on Paralegals.”

Her current scholarly focus is on access to justice effort locally, nationally, and internationally. As the program director for Paralegal Studies, she has been active in creating the Paralegal Clinic course as well as community-based short-term clinics such as expungement clinics to eradicate low-level marijuana related criminal convictions.

During her Fulbright-Nehru grant, Prof. Phillips intends to collaborate, develop and co-teach legal skills curriculum for paralegals and interns at the Human Rights Law Network, the legal clinics at the National Law University Delhi, and other paralegal organizations. The primary goal is to increase these organizations’ capacity, communication and collaboration to promote access to justice. The secondary goal is to form solid collaborations between the not-for-profits and law schools to enhance access to representation. Specifically, the training and teaching will support Human Rights Law Network in hosting more volunteers, enhance and grow legal clinics at NLU Delhi, and support community paralegal networks.

Purnima Madhivanan

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Scholar Fellowship
Project Title:	Building Capacity for Research and Care for Women Cancer Survivors in India
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
Host Institution:	JSS Academy of Higher Education & Research (JSSAHER), Mysuru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	March 2023
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Purnima Madhivanan is an Associate Professor in Health Promotion Sciences at the Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at University of Arizona, Tucson. She received her medical training at the Government Medical College in Mysore, India and then an MPH and PhD in Epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Madhivanan has extensive experience in conducting multi-site domestic and international clinical and translational studies. She is the site PI and the Director of the Global Health Training Program at University of Arizona, Tucson for the Global Health Equity Scholar consortium in collaboration with Stanford, Yale and University of California, Berkeley. She also directs the Fogarty-Fulbright Fellowship program for University of Arizona. Dr. Madhivanan has been a PI of multiple federal and foundation grants, as well as a mentor and investigator of numerous NIH, CDC, and industry-sponsored studies and clinical trials. She has also served on multiple national and international research and steering committees.

Her research has focused on disadvantaged populations, elucidating the dynamics of poverty, gender, and the sociopolitical determinants of health, in particular the impact on women and children living in rural and limited resource communities. She has worked in India, Peru, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Nigeria, Ethiopia and in the US. To situate her research close to the communities she serves, she established a clinical site in Mysore, India in 2005 while completing her PhD dissertation. For over a decade, the Prerana Women’s Health Initiative has delivered low-cost, high-quality comprehensive reproductive health services to 50,000 low-income women living in Mysore.

Her work has resulted in more than 200 peer-review publications. She continues to develop novel lines of research and has been supported by foundations, biotechnology companies, federal and international funding organizations. Dr. Madhivanan serves as an advisor to a number of state departments of Public Health, non-profit as well as governmental research organizations. In 2007, she received the prestigious International Leadership Award from the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation for her work on HIV prevention. She is recipient of several teaching and mentoring awards including the Maria Valdez Mentoring Award at the University of Arizona

The overarching goal of Dr. Madhivanan’s Fulbright-Nehru project is to advocate for the medical and social needs of female cancer survivors and build capacity for research that will develop a survivorship care evidence base, explore strategies to facilitate provision of survivorship care, and disseminate best survivorship care practices to Indian physicians and public health practitioners. It is estimated that about 34,000 women are diagnosed annually with cancer in the south Indian state of Karnataka. Assuming an 81% overall five-year survival rate, the state would have more than 137,000 women cancer survivors in any year. In India, there is almost no active follow-up for patients who survive cancer treatment and there is limited information about their physical and mental health, and overall quality of life.

Sarah Pinto

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Scholar Fellowship
Project Title:	Beyond Bioethics: Teaching, Researching, and Thinking with the Good Death in West Bengal, India
Field of Study:	Anthropology
Home Institution:	Tufts University, Medford, MA
Host Institution:	Presidency University, Kolkata, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Sarah Pinto is a Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. Her research and teaching addresses cultures and histories of biomedicine in South Asia, especially as they pertain to kinship and gender. Most recently she has been working on histories of psychiatry in South Asia, with a focus on diagnoses related to “hysteria.” She is author of three books, Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India (Berghahn 2008), Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India (University of Pennsylvania Press 2014), which was awarded the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize for ethnographic writing on gender and health, and The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis (Women Unlimited 2019/Fordham University Press 2020), and numerous scholarly articles. Her current efforts consider concepts of the “good death” as they emerge in and beyond bioethical framings, highly collaborative models for ethnographic research and teaching, and writing at the intersections of ethnography, history, and fiction.

During her Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Pinto intends to involve several interlinked components: teaching a seminar-style workshop for graduate students, conducting preliminary ethnographic research, and building a collaborative research paradigm for ongoing work. The theme of these efforts is contemporary concepts of “good death” in West Bengal. Amid rapid changes in the Indian medical and legal landscape of end-of-life care, Prof. Pinto asks how ideas about a good death are formed and reformed at the juncture of medicine, law, religion, and everyday life. What does a good death look like in and beyond global bioethical formulations?

Andrew Ashley

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Crafting Rice: Low-GI Seeds and Diabetes care in India and the Diaspora
Field of Study:	Anthropology
Home Institution:	New York University, New York, NY
Host Institution:	ICAR-Indian Institute of Rice Research, Hyderabad, Telangana
Grant Start Month:	January 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Andrew Ashley, a medical anthropologist and PhD candidate at New York University, studies how people live with diabetes and other chronic health concerns in India and among the Indian diaspora in the United States. In particular, Mr. Ashley is interested in the intersection of health, science, agriculture, and technology to see how scientists manipulate seeds themselves to provide better healthcare. Mr. Ashley’s work also provides a comparative look at living with Type II diabetes in India and in the United States. Previously, Mr. Ashley has conducted research on the possibilities and limits of multicultural governance strategies in a former mill town in northern England; the evolving cultural landscape of suburban North Carolina; and the complications and anxieties of life on student and temporary work visa for IT migrants from India to the United States. Mr. Ashley has conducted fieldwork on South Asian diasporas in northern England; The “Research Triangle” of North Carolina; Chicagoland; and New York and New Jersey metro area. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of North Carolina; a master’s degree in Geography from the University of Kentucky; and master’s degrees with a focus on Anthropology from the University of Chicago and NYU. Mr. Ashley is also a filmmaker and a recipient of the Culture and Media certificate from NYU. His most recent film Sehnsucht (2021) looks at the shifting landscape of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the effect these layers have on him. Mr. Ashley also plans to make a film during his Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, around his research.

Mr. Ashley aims to conduct his dissertation research on living with diabetes in Hyderabad. He aims to conduct ethnographic fieldwork with people diagnosed with Type I or Type II diabetes, their family members and caregivers, and doctors and other medical health professionals and researchers. Mr. Ashley seeks to also conduct ethnographic fieldwork with crop scientists and medical researchers who are working to create new forms of low Glycemic Index rice. In particular, Mr. Ashley hopes to understand how this focus on rice echoes and also shifts previous Indian agricultural development projects since Independence; and what role crop scientists feel they have in combating this diabetes epidemic.

Alexa Burnston

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Carnatic performance studies in Chennai
Field of Study:	Voice
Home Institution:	U.S.: Duke University, Durham, NC
Host Institution:	University of Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	August 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Alexa Burnston graduated from Duke University in May 2022 with a Bachelor of Arts. Her self-designed (Program II) major was titled: “Understanding the Concept of Value Through the Lens of Classical Musical Traditions,” where she explored the meaning of classical music and its perceptions of value across the human experience. She is a trained opera singer who ventured into jazz and Carnatic singing during her time in college. In Spring 2022, she performed a senior distinction recital in all three music forms, completed an ethnomusicology honors thesis, and graduated Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with a 4.0 GPA, and with distinction.

While at Duke, she participated in numerous related student groups, serving as President of Small Town Records -Duke’s premier on-campus record label, serving on the student programming board (DUU), and in roles at Duke’s arts umbrella organization (duARTS), Duke’s Arts and Entertainment Alumni network (DEMAN), and the Duke in New York Arts and Media program (DiNY).

She has received numerous accolades for her work in music, including a Benenson Award in the Arts from Duke University, where she was able to begin her Carnatic and jazz training, Duke University Union’s Event of the Year Award, and received recognition for her work as a member of the CMA EDU leadership program. She has also been awarded for her opera singing.

Ms. Burnston’s passions in music span beyond her singing, and she also has direct arts administration and industry experience. She has been working in arts administration roles since the age of 16 and has worked in roles at Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Palm Beach Opera. In the music industry, she maintains an interest in classical music as well as music policy and supervision, working in roles at notable classical label Naxos of America, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and global record label Sony Music. Her experiences have prepared her to connect her research to a future career in the music industry.

Ms. Burnston’s background provides a comparative perspective for Carnatic research and will glean India-specific insights to explore the different ways to help markets and musicians. She will study in Chennai, the hub of Carnatic music, work with music students at the University of Madras, and analyze the role of arts administration in Carnatic music by working with Sabhas (music venues) and local arts administrators. Her Fulbright-Nehru research project is centered around the December season, during which Chennai hosts the largest Carnatic music festival in the world. She also aims to pursue a personal project about digital music distribution and continue Carnatic voice lessons.

Christopher Chacon

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	The Global Aspirations of Hindu Intellectualism and Anticolonialism
Field of Study:	Energy
Home Institution:	Clarkson University, Irvine, CA
Host Institution:	Ambedkar University, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	October 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Christopher Leo Chacon is a sixth year History PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and works on early twentieth century Hindu political thought under his doctoral advisor, Dr. Vinayak Chaturvedi. Specifically, he is interested in how Hindu anticolonialism and intellectualism fostered innovative conceptions of history and social reform during the last decades of colonial India as well as for the global Indian community. He is a California State University Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program scholar and has received numerous awards for writing and research. He was an AIIS Language fellow in 2018-2019 and studied Hindi in Jaipur, India. He was also the 2016 Southern California Regional Conference of Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society Best Graduate Paper Award recipient for their world history category.

Mr. Chacon enjoys facilitating discussions on history as a Teaching Assistant, a position he has held since 2017. While at UCI, he has guest lectured on topics ranging from ancient world history to Indian religions. A native of Orange County, he received his bachelor’s degree in Anthropology, History, and Religious Studies and his master’s degree in History from California State University, Fullerton in 2013 and 2016 respectively. While speaking on behalf of his graduating class in 2013, Mr. Chacon underscored his belief in a holistic approach to the humanities as well as dedicated himself to mentoring future young scholars as he began his graduate career. He has kept that promise by pursuing several certificate programs at his university centered on mentorship and currently leads a writing group for his department. Mr. Chacon will graduate in 2023 and, after completing his Mellon postdoctoral teaching appointment at UCI, pursue a career in either academics or the federal government. He will be the first in his family to receive a PhD. In his spare time, he enjoys watching films and bowling with family and friends.

Mr. Chacon’s Fulbright-Nehru project is an investigation into the transnational works of Lajpat Rai and Bhai Parmanand in order to reconstruct of one of the most consequential and influential sociopolitical movements of the 20th century—Hindu intellectualism. Through the lens of the relatively new and innovative field of global intellectual history, Mr. Chacon focuses on the writings of Parmanand and Rai so as to argue that their ideas were essential to the development of global Hindu intellectualism. Mr. Chacon has compiled evidence that strongly suggests their transnational experiences shaped Hindu intellectualism, which in turn contributed to worldbuilding before and after independence.

Davis Clark

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Development of a Farmer-led Co-op in Uttarkhand, India
Field of Study:	Agriculture
Home Institution:	Western Colorado University, Gunnison, CO
Host Institution:	Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna Garwhal University, Srinagar, Uttarakhand
Grant Start Month:	August 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Davis Clark, originally from North Carolina, received his Bachelor of Science in environmental science from Appalachian State University. After serving as a sustainable agriculture extension agent Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal, and being evacuated due to the Covid-19 global pandemic, Mr. Clark started his Master’s in Environmental Management at Western Colorado University in June of 2021. Through his experience working with local rural farmers in West Africa with the Peace Corps, and an impactful visit to the rural Himalayan regions of Uttarakhand, Mr. Clark was inspired to work at the grassroots level to improve local food systems in vulnerable regions of the world. His passion for the wilderness, mountaineering, regenerative agriculture, trees, and agroforestry has led him to seek meaningful and impactful work amongst farmers and producers in mountain regions from Southern Appalachia, the Central Rockies of Colorado, and the Himalayas of India.

The co-op conceptualized by Mr. Clark, for his Fulbright-Nehru project, focuses on increasing resilience across the local food system, community of rural farmers, agricultural landscape, and individuals involved. Through the extension of regenerative agriculture practices, agroforestry techniques, water conservation, and adaptive land management the co-op will improve the resiliency of the land, improve soil health, decrease drought vulnerability, and increase the resilience of the local food system. Furthermore, the co-op will focus on increasing connectivity amongst local producers, resource sharing, market access, and local support from the community.

Anna Correa

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Understanding Mental Health Among Migrants in Bangalore, India: A Qualitative Study
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	University of Iowa College of Public Health, Iowa City, IA
Host Institution:	St. John’s Medical College, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Anna Correa is a recent graduate of the University of Iowa College of Public Health where she received a Masters of Public Health in Community and Behavioral Health. She previously completed bachelor’s degrees in public health and international relations (transnational issues emphasis) at the University of Iowa. Ms. Correa’s educational background includes work in migration, qualitative research methods, and community-engaged public health. During her time in college, Ms. Correa worked for the University of Iowa Prevention Research Center for Rural Health where she assisted in the implementation of a community-based physical activity program. She is the Principal Investigator for a research study examining the impact of COVID-19 on student resident assistants in university dorms.

Outside of academics, Ms. Correa was deeply involved in her community, serving as the President for Iowa Agni South Asian A Cappella group, Co-Chair of the University Lecture Committee, and member of many additional groups. In 2021, Ms. Correa began studying Hindi through the Critical Language Scholarship and will continue her studies in 2022 with the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship.

Ms. Correa loves people, and she tries to get to know everyone she can. She looks forward to her time in Bangalore and hopes to meet many new friends in her time there.

As Bangalore continues to grow, the migrant population increases but the support for migrant laborer well-being has not kept pace. Ms. Correa, as part of her Fulbright-Nehru project, aims to conduct qualitative research with three unique migrant groups: i) construction workers, ii) artisans, and iii) information technology employees. In doing so, Ms. Correa hopes to better understand the needs of migrant laborers in the city and build relationships between researchers at St. John’s and members of the migrant worker community.

Sonali Deliwala

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Studying the Economic Impact of Land Rights for Adivasis in Gujarat
Field of Study:	Development Studies
Home Institution:	University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Host Institution:	Gujarat Vidyapith, Ahmedabad, Gujarat
Grant Start Month:	August 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Sonali Deliwala graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in Spring 2022 with double majors in Political Science and Economics and a minor in Creative Writing. Ms. Deliwala has gained policy research experience through internships at numerous organizations, including the DC Congressional Office of Representative Pramila Jayapal, the Brookings Institution, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She been heavily involved in the Philly-based grassroots organization #VoteThatJawn, working as a Teaching Assistant (for the Academically Based Community Service Course “Writing and Politics,”) a Youth Leader, and a student reporter to get 18-year-olds registered to vote and first-time voters to the polls for the 2018 midterms and 2020 general election. Ms. Deliwala has held various positions in political science and economic research, a Spring 2021 Fellow for Penn’s Program on Public Opinion Research & Election Studies (PORES), a Summer 2021 Fox Fellowship at Brookings, and serving as a research assistant for multiple Penn faculty. She was also awarded the 2019 Terry B. Heled Travel & Research Grant to document the lives of an Adivasi community in her family’s hometown in India as well as the 2020-2021 U.S. Department of Education’s Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship. Ms. Deliwala is interested in studying rural economic development in South Asia.

Under the Fulbright-Nehru Student Research program, Ms. Deliwala is carrying out the project in the Narmada district of Gujarat, which is heavily populated by Adivasis, primarily the Gujarati-speaking Tavdi and Vasava tribes. This project will ultimately provide a critical case study of how Adivasis in India have been economically impacted by gaining land rights and offer insights into a path of sustainable development for the community.

Siddhi Deshpande

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Climate Change and Nutrition Transition Among the Rural Poor of Maharashtra, India
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	The Pennsylvania State University—University Park, University Park, PA
Host Institution:	Savitribai Phule Pune University, Mangaluru, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	August 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Siddhi Deshpande is a graduate of The Pennsylvania State University Schreyer Honors College, where she majored in Neurobiology with minors in Global Health and World Literature. In her time at Penn State, she pursued a variety of interests in public health and medicine. She completed an honors thesis in the Water, Health, and Nutrition lab, titled “Examining Water Insecurity as a Driver of Nutrition Transition Among Tsimane’ Adults in Lowland Bolivia”. Through this thesis, she found that water insecurity was associated with increased consumption of sugary beverages among Tsimane’ in Amazonion Bolivia. Furthermore, the level of market integration also played a role in probability of sugary beverage consumption. Her research in water insecurity, nutrition, and health in a global health setting sparked her interest in conducting similar research in India, which is the reason she applied to the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship! Besides her research, Ms. Deshpande also took a broader interest in environmental health. She co-founded and co-led an organization called Sunrise Movement State College, where she worked with her community to organize local climate demonstrations, advocated for climate justice measures, and campaigned for divestment from the fossil fuel industry. She believes that community-wide advocacy and the will to confront the reality of climate change will help achieve climate justice in our communities.

After completion of the Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Deshpande plans to attend medical school and attain a dual MD/MPH degree. In university, Ms. Deshpande worked as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), where she treated 100+ patients on a 911 ambulance service. Enjoying the work of treating patients but also hoping to serve her community on a larger scale, Ms. Deshpande hopes to combine an education in medicine and public health to serve as a physician who advocates for her community and works towards climate justice. She envisions herself conducting environmental health research and influencing policy alongside her responsibilities in clinical medicine.

In India, growing rates of obesity, insulin resistance and cardiometabolic disease are present alongside malnutrition and hunger across India. Climate change has been understudied in connection to this nutrition transition, despite increased drought across India and a rapid demographic change as a result. Food insecurity is an important mechanism of the consequent public health impacts; Ms. Deshpande plans to investigate how declining agricultural productivity, driven by climate change, causes nutrition transition from undernutrition to obesity among the rural poor. Ms. Deshpande is studying under Dr. Angeline Jeyakumar at Savitraibai Phule Pune University, where she is conducting research in Pune and Latur.

Laila Durrani

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Examining India’s Post-Pandemic Educational Frameworks: An Exploration of Gender Disparities
Field of Study:	Gender Studies
Home Institution:	Smith College, Northampton, MA
Host Institution:	Ambedkar University, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	August 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Laila Noor Durrani is a recent graduate of Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts. She was born in New York City, and is of Indian origin. She holds a BA in Mathematics and Government, with a focus on global political systems. She has worked for a number of non-profit organizations in northern India, particularly those who work to address gaps in the country’s educational infrastructures, and to improve women’s access to education. Ms. Durrani is interested in the intersections between political conflict and gender disparities, and the ways that political violence often disproportionately infringe upon women’s freedoms and rights, in India, and globally. After her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Durrani hopes to attend graduate school for further her studies in Public Policy and Government, continuing to build upon her academic interests.

Through her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Durrani is investigating the effects of COVID-19 on India’s education systems, examining how the pandemic has exacerbated gender disparities in the realm of educational access, particularly within regions of India which have historically experienced political violence or instability. Ms. Durrani is working with the Observer Research Foundation as well as a number of education-focused non-profit organizations to write a series of proposals to inform future policy with regard to educational access.

Rhône Grajcar

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Understanding Community at Dargahs in Light of COVID-19
Field of Study:	Art History
Home Institution:	Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA
Host Institution:	Ambedkar University, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	January 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Rhône Grajcar graduated from Whitman College in 2021 with a Bachelor of Arts in History and South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies. At Whitman he explored South Asian religions and US foreign policy, culminating in eight months spent in India on a David L. Boren Scholarship. He has followed his interests to internships at the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the South Asia Practice at the Albright Stonebridge Group. He is eager to deepen his understanding of South Asia religions and contribute to the study of shrines during his Fulbright-Nehru grant.

Mr. Grajcar’s Fulbright-Nehru project involves ethnographic field work at Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki Dargah in New Delhi and Dargah Yousoufain in Hyderabad, within the dargahs’ compounds. By engaging the dargah attendees in conversation, the project seeks to understand how COVID-19 and its impacts on daily life have affected the sense of community dargahs are renowned for. These shared spaces rely on crowded gatherings and communal food during langar to build their inclusive potentialities, which will present challenges in a post-COVID world. Situating the project in the understanding of dargahs as discursive, rather than fixed spaces, Mr. Grajcar hopes to help capture how these resilient institutions and their exploratory authority weather the disruptions of the pandemic.

Kyle Hornick

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Illustrating Preservation: Documenting Thangka Painting through the Graphic Novel
Field of Study:	Drawing and Illustration
Home Institution:	University of Denver, Denver, CO
Host Institution:	University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh
Grant Start Month:	August 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Kyle Hornick’s interest in India and Buddhist philosophy began when he spent four months studying abroad in Varanasi, India, in the fall of 2019. After leaving, he returned to his home institution, the University of Denver where he finished his final semester and received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics.

In addition to his interest in math, he also explored his artistic nature, taking courses in visual arts whenever possible. His artistic coursework culminated in independent study in graphic novels under the supervision of painter Jeffrey Keith. After his graduation, he chose to further his studies in art and received two years of formal training through the Watts Atelier of the Arts, a school based in Encinitas, California focused on teaching fundamental art skills and traditional painting. Since then, Mr. Hornick has worked on a series of self-directed graphic novel projects, which involved independent research into chosen subject matter, writing, illustrating, and digitally formatting stories like “Shrubby, Self,” and “A Trick of the Light.” Occasionally he finds work in the field of engineering as a technical illustrator where he brings to life the designs of various companies. Besides art, he is interested in the study of language (French and Hindi), world travel, dance, and trekking.

Mr. Hornick is conducting his Fulbright-Nehru project in Dharamshala, India, where he is illustrating the story of Indian and Tibetan preservation efforts of thangka painting with a graphic novel. He hopes to emphasize the Center for Living Buddhist Art’s origin story and will place this narrative in the context of India and Tibet’s shared Buddhist history. His pages in progress will be on display at the Hope Café gallery in Dharamshala and the project will culminate in a final exhibition and panel discussion that will be organized with the help of the Central University of Himachal Pradesh.

Yasaswini Iyer

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Air Pollution and Cardiovascular Risk in India: Public Perceptions and Knowledge
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH
Host Institution:	TERI - The Energy and Resources Institute, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Yasaswini Iyer is dual degree graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemical Biology and an Master’s in Public Health from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio. During her time at CWRU she served as President and Advocacy Chair for Advocates for Cleveland Health (A4CH), a community based organization that addresses public health outcomes through education, advocacy, and volunteering. Ms. Iyer also served as the Vice President of Finance and Director of Academic Achievement for her sorority, Alpha Gamma Delta. She loved the process of teaching and mentorship throughout her academic journey at CWRU and served as a TA for an introductory biology class BIOL 215: Cells and Proteins and an introductory biochemistry class BIOC 328: Introduction to Biochemistry. She received the Outstanding TA award in 2021. Since her freshman year in college, Ms. Iyer explored her interests in research by conducting wet lab research in the Genetics Department at CWRU School of Medicine, Computational Biology research at Georgetown School of Medicine, qualitative survey analysis as a TA for BIOC 328, and Public Health research at the Harrington Heart and Vascular institute. Her diligence to science has awarded her presentations at several conferences and publications.

Ms. Iyer is also a company Bharatanatyam dancer at Natya Dance Theater based out of Chicago, IL. She has been dancing since she was five years old and has performed at several notable venues around the world including Millennium Park, Bharat Kalachar, Navy Pier, HI DC, and Brahma Gana Sabha to name a few. Ms. Iyer follows a plant-based diet and enjoys cooking and trying out new recipes in her free time.

Through her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Iyer is conducting nine months of research assessing public perceptions and knowledge towards air pollution as a cardiovascular risk factor in India. Environmental factors are increasingly related to human health, especially hypertension. She hopes her project will eventually result in the design of culturally sensitive interventions contextualized across socioeconomic gradients. Ms. Iyer is situated in New Delhi, India and collaborating with the CCDC (Center for Disease Control). She is creating/administering questionnaires to probe the public perspectives on the relationship between the two variables. She is excited to engage with a healthcare system different from that of the U.S.

Rishabh Jain

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Artificial Intelligence for Refractive Surgery in India
Field of Study:	Medical Sciences
Home Institution:	Duke University, Durham, NC
Host Institution:	Thadomal Shahani Engineering College, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	August 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Rishabh Jain graduated magna cum laude with Departmental Distinction in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University, where he was elected, in his junior year, to Tau Beta Pi. His research interests have spanned diverse fields, from bioengineering to technology policy to rural healthcare access. His senior thesis work as a Pratt Research Fellow consisted of designing a self-assembling, peptide-based supramolecular vaccine for Zika virus, for which he received the Howard G. Clark Award for Excellence in Research. He has also conducted research on injectable hydrogels for tissue repair after stroke as a Huang Fellow and has published on the pitfalls of thermal facial recognition during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences as a Bass Connections Research Fellow.

Mr. Jain is a contributor to the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s Editor’s Choice section and authored two chapters in an upcoming book on the ocular manifestations of systemic disease. He spent a summer interning at a CAR-T cell company and authoring an investment thesis on cell and gene therapy for a biotechnology-focused venture capital firm.

On campus, Mr. Jain served as Co-Founder and Co-President of the Duke chapter of Remote Area Medical (RAM), a national nonprofit that organizes free pop-up clinics to provide medical, dental, and vision care. With RAM, he led undergraduates and graduate students in multi-dimensional service, research, and advocacy efforts to improve healthcare access for underserved communities, culminating in the deployment of the first RAM clinic in North Carolina.

In his free time, Mr. Jain loves to cook and try new dishes. In 2019, he founded The Black Tile, a pop-up supper club where he served four-course tasting menus to six Duke students at a time. By donating profits to the local food bank, he has been able to provide almost 6000 meals to those in need. He also volunteered with Root Causes, an organization that delivers free, healthy food to food-insecure families.

India has the highest disease burden of uncorrected refractive error (URE) in the world, as measured by disability-adjusted life years. Refractive surgery has been able to vastly improve vision in patients with URE, but there are crucial decisions around the type and parameters of these surgeries that influence patient outcomes and affect postoperative complications. Mr. Jain’s Fulbright-Nehru project is focused on the use of artificial intelligence in refractive surgery, applying deep learning algorithms to the Indian population.

Christian James

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Song as Feminist Development Discourse in Kangra, Himachal Pradesh
Field of Study:	Music Studies
Home Institution:	Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
Host Institution:	Ahmedabad University, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	February 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Christian James is a PhD Candidate in Indiana University’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. His dissertation examines the role of musical performance in internationally funded human development initiatives operating within the Kangra District of Himachal Pradesh.

For over a decade, Mr. James has studied cultures and languages of North India with a special interest in folksongs of western Himachal Pradesh and Greater Punjab. He is proficient in four South Asian languages: Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and the Kangri dialect of Western Pahari. He has received multiple awards and fellowships for language and area studies, including two Critical Language Scholarships. With support from the U.S. Department of Education and Indiana University’s Center for the Study of Global Change, Mr. James spent the 2021-2022 academic year enrolled as the sole student in the first ever Kangri language course offered through the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Alongside his dissertation topic, Mr. James’ research interests include language ideology, public folklore, and Indic musicology. In 2021, the Midwestern Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology awarded him the JaFran Jones prize in recognition of his paper, “Nādānusandhān: Sound Studies and its Lexical Genealogy in Hindi-language Music Scholarship.” Mr. James has worked as an Articles Editor for Folklore Forum, the open-access journal of Folklore and Ethnomusicology Publications (also known as Trickster Press). In 2020, he served Traditional Arts Indiana as a contributor and editor for Memory, Art, & Aging, a public-facing resource guide encouraging older adults and elder care workers to engage with folk and traditional arts.

Mr. James has maintained an abiding passion for music throughout his life. In 2014, he completed a Bachelor’s of Music degree in composition from Oberlin Conservatory. His compositions have featured in several international venues, including the Charlotte New Music Festival in North Carolina (2013), Dharamshala International Film Festival in Himachal Pradesh (2014), and the Syndicate for the New Arts in Ohio (2017). He has worked as a choral singer, music educator, and church music director in Ohio and Indiana as well as his home state of Michigan.

Mr. James’ Fulbright-Nehru project investigates the role of participatory song in the feminist social development work of Jagori Rural Charitable Trust, a non-governmental organization operating in the Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh. Through a combination of participant observation, recorded interview, and audiovisual documentation, Mr. James assesses the effects of collective singing on the delivery of the organization’s objectives concerning the social, economic, and political empowerment of women and girls. The final report documents and analyzes the organization’s total song repertoire, the effects of specific songs, and participants’ experiences of those effects through performance.

Lucas Joshi

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Writing on the Wall – The Goa Civil Code and the Marginality of Domestic Workers
Field of Study:	Labor/Industrial Relations
Home Institution:	Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Host Institution:	Goa University, Taleigao Plateau, Goa
Grant Start Month:	August 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Lucas Cole Joshi is scholar of Afro-Asian studies. Born to an Indian father and biracial mother, Mr. Joshi now attends Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, graduating in the spring of 2022. At Dartmouth, he served as the Founder and Co-President of cultural magazine, Dear Dartmouth and as the Founder and President of (post)-colonial book club, Chapter Two. A recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Mr. Joshi worked alongside undergraduate scholars of color in the production of his own research grounded in themes of mourning and memory in a (post)-colonial lens. His honors thesis, entitled “With Deepest Sympathy, a New Mourning in the Hour of Basque Reconciliation,” complicates notions of victimhood and reconciliation as it would lend itself to the post-terrorism era of the Basque Country. Mr. Joshi is a co-author of the book, Transatlantic Letters: An Epistolary Exchange Between Basque and US Students on Violence and Community published within the Human Rights Collection of Deusto University.

Upon completion of the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Mr. Joshi will pursue his PhD in Comparative Literature at Brown University. At Brown, he will work alongside professors Leela Gandhi and Leila Lenhen in responding to questions of the Indian Ocean as an autonomous body of violation and solidarity. Ultimately, he intends to realign Afro-Asian Studies through an emphasis on critical mixed-race theories and affinities.

A relic of the Portuguese colonial era, Goa’s Civil Code presents a complex story of labor governance and rights, particularly with respect to domestic workers throughout the community. Through this research, Mr. Joshi’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the contemporary conditions that define the lives and livelihoods of domestic workers in Goa. Further, he is contextualizing domestic labor as a continuation of the legacy of Afro-Asian enslavement. The project represents a deeper inquiry into the labor that has stood as the backbone of Goa: once the “Rome of the East” and now the heart of Indian interculturality.

Meher Kaur

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Migrant Women’s Access to Maternal and Reproductive Healthcare during COVID-19
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	University of Richmond, Richmond, VA
Host Institution:	Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	February 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Meher Kaur is a graduate from the University of Richmond, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Global Studies with a concentration in Development Studies. During her time at the University of Richmond, Ms. Kaur’s studies and research focused in the areas of labor studies, gender studies, and economic empowerment in India. She wrote an Honors Economics Thesis on India’s biometric ID system – Aadhaar, and its ability to facilitate access to public welfare schemes and private services for India’s vulnerable population groups. She also wrote a senior thesis on the city of Gurgaon, India and how its social and urban development was impacted by India’s transition to a neoliberal state and economy. During her time at university, Ms. Kaur also lived in rural Odisha, India, for three months while working with the Indian NGO Gram Vikas to provide water and sanitation services to tribal populations in remote areas. She further studied abroad in Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Cape Town as part of a multidisciplinary urban studies and economic development study program. Following graduation, Ms. Kaur worked with J-PAL South Asia as a Field Research Associate for a project based out of Punjab, India, where she studied drug use among Punjabi youth and developed and tested the effectiveness of a media awareness campaign. During this time, she realized her interest in the field of public health.

Ms. Kaur is interested in studying and building solutions to address gaps in India’s healthcare delivery systems, with a focus on women and disadvantaged population groups. She is passionate about community-driven research and hopes to grow her skillset through field research and networking with organizations in India’s social sector.

Maternal and reproductive health refers to the health of women before, during, and after pregnancy and the capability to make decisions to reproduce. Studies on Indian migration reveal that urban migrants often lack basic healthcare services, and emerging research in the era of COVID-19 shows that new barriers to healthcare access have formed. Ms. Kaur aims to use a mixed-methods and community-driven approach to bring the perspectives of underrepresented groups such as migrant women to the context of existing policies that cater to urban migrants’ health needs.

Andrew Kerr

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Poetic Publics: Imaginations of Belonging and Identity in Contemporary North India
Field of Study:	Anthropology
Home Institution:	University of California- San Diego, San Diego, CA
Host Institution:	Ambedkar University, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	March 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Andrew Kerr is currently pursuing a PhD in Anthropology. His research world revolves around questions of poetry, semiotics, emotion, and sociality. Meanwhile, his commitments and passions are to always be engaged in collaborative work that centers human dignity. Mr. Kerr is a previous fellow with the American India Foundation and Urdu language resident director in Lucknow for the South Asia Flagship Language Initiative. He holds a BSc in Physics from Austin Peay State University, an MA in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago, and is always seeking to learn more.

Mr. Kerr’s Fulbright-Nehru project engages contemporary poetry in North India as not only literature or art, but also as a medium of popular expression that carries affective force in the public sphere. This study is taking place in Delhi, Lucknow, and Mumbai to explore questions about the public sphere, publics, affect, and imaginations of being Indian. The highlight on Urdu poetry, especially, will address the dearth of ethnographic analysis in Urdu studies, while also bringing an extended study of Urdu poetry in India into the growing body of literature in the anthropology of poetry.

Suraj Kushwaha

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Transethnic and Transnational Labor: Porters in India’s Mountain Tourism Industry
Field of Study:	Interdisciplinary Studies
Home Institution:	Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
Host Institution:	Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana
Grant Start Month:	November 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Suraj Kushwaha is a recent graduate of Princeton University, where he studied a self-designed curriculum for an independent major in Postcolonial Environmental Studies. His research interests center around South Asian languages, culture, and history. He has lived and studied in India for two years, first on Princeton’s Bridge Year Program in Varanasi and later on a Boren Scholarship for intensive Hindi language study in Jaipur and Mussoorie. He is especially interested in the Himalaya, its people, and the complex environmental, economic, and cultural conflicts that have arisen with the opening of this region to unprecedented numbers of pilgrims, tourists, and mountaineers through globalization and development. His research interests include the imperial legacy of Himalayan mountaineering and the role of mountaineering in the formation of an “Indian” identity. His senior thesis probed the role of local knowledge in the colonial exploration of the Himalaya and Tibet. He hopes to address the absence of local people’s and porters’ perspectives in the history of mountaineering by collaborating on oral history and ethnographic research alongside these communities.

After the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Mr. Kushwaha hopes to pursue graduate studies and a career as a professor. Outside of his studies, Mr. Kushwaha gravitates toward the remote, vertical environments of mountains near and far. As an avid climber and aspiring mountain guide, he views climbing as a transformative medium to connect with environment, self, and others. He is constantly pushing his own limits in climbing and helping others to break down barriers and do the same.

Mr. Kushwaha’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring and documenting the histories and lived experiences of porters working in India’s Central Himalayan Mountain tourism industry. By observing porters on their assignments and conducting interviews with consenting porters, he hopes to identify key issues facing porters in an evolving labor geography. The research seeks to address the omission of porters’ perspectives from the discourse on the legacy of imperialism in the Himalaya. Mr. Kushwaha hopes to highlight porters’ crucial role in a growing industry and understand the challenges they face as they navigate a nuanced labor niche inflected by a history of British imperial exploration.

Christopher LaMountain

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Petal Tones: on devotional intonation in the Lotus Temple
Field of Study:	Art History
Home Institution:	Northeastern University, Evanston, IL
Host Institution:	Ahmedabad University, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	November 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Christopher LaMountain is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he pursued a double major in Religious Studies and Music Performance Studies. After being awarded an Undergraduate Research Grant from Northwestern in 2018, Mr. LaMountain completed a multi-media research project comparing gynecological texts of Mediterranean Antiquity with Marian narratives of the New Testament Apocrypha. In the latter portion of his collegiate career, Mr. LaMountain conducted research on devotional music at seven of the eight continental Baha’i Houses of Worship as the 2019 Northwestern Circumnavigator grantee. Having sung in choirs and as a classically trained tenor soloist, Mr. LaMountain also sung with the musicians of Baha’i Temples around the world and subsequently produced his honors undergraduate thesis comparing the musical styles and presentation forms of devotional music at the different Baha’i Temples. With the help of his colleagues from the Bienen School of Music, Mr. LaMountain has also presented two concert lectures on his comparative Baha’i musicological studies, which featured musical excepts from his worldwide research trip. Interested in inter-religious musicology and cross-cultural studies, Mr. LaMountain has achieved proficiency in French, Italian, and Hindi, passed upper-level courses on various traditions of the major world religions, and studied musical traditions, such as Negro Spiritual, Western Classical, Hindustani, Ugandan traditional, and Nueva Cancion Chilena musical styles. Mr. LaMountain aspires to pursue a graduate degree in sacred music studies, become a religious studies and musicology professor, and continue singing in choirs over the course of his life.

With his Fulbright-Nehru project, Mr. LaMountain is both observing and participating in the process of devotional music making at the prayer services of the Asian Baha’i House of Worship, called the Lotus Temple. In comparing both these observed musical styles and presentational forms of the Lotus Temple with other faith spaces in Delhi, for example Akshardham and ISKCON Temples, Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, Myanmar Buddha Temple, and Moti Masjid, Mr. LaMountain is determining the manner in which local worship music from religious traditions outside of the Baha’i Faith influences intonation of the Lotus Temple.

Abiola Makinde

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Collaborative Design: Patients, Caregivers, and Designers
Field of Study:	Design
Home Institution:	Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	August 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Abiola Makinde is a Nigerian-American woman from Lagos and South Florida. As a recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Industrial Design, she completed a senior thesis centered around Sickle Cell and Pain Management. As an Emergency Design Council Fellow she collaborated with designers from the IDC School of Design and the National Institute of Design in researching and designing solutions to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the mental health of children in India. Ms. Makinde has also served as a Design Educator for high school students in an after-school program, which focused on the fundamentals and importance of collaborating in the design thinking process.

Ms. Makinde’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining research design solutions to extend culturally relevant and adaptable hospital and home tools and services for Indian children with Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) and their caretakers past the hospital and into their homes before and after visits. With the support of Prof. Ravi Poovaiah of The Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and Dr. Yazdi Italia of the Shirin and Jamshed Guzder Regional Blood Centre, her intention is to understand the patient’s journey and challenge points to find ways, through the lens of design, to positively affect the overall experience of the patient and the caregiver.

Janani Mandayam Comar

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Kings, Serfs, and Saints: The role of narrative literature in shaping Hindu Ethics
Field of Study:	Art History
Home Institution:	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL
Host Institution:	French Institute of Pondicherry, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	October 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Janani Comar is a PhD student at the University of Toronto in the Department of Religion. Her research is at the intersection of religion, caste, and performance. She is particularly interested in the way mythological narratives engage in ethical discourses. Her dissertation looks at hagiographies of mythic figures in colonial South India, and she traces the circulation of their narratives through print and performance. At University of Toronto, she holds the Connaught International Doctoral Scholarship and was a recipient of the MITACS Research Training Award in 2020. She has presented her research at several conferences, including the annual South Asia Conference held at University of Wisconsin Madison.

For the Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Comar aims to revisit the history of modern Hinduism to explore how religion and ethics are intimately linked to social status in the colonial period. Working with scholars at the French Institute of Pondicherry, she is focusing on the writings of subaltern Tamil-speaking communities and explore how these groups participated in lively ethical debates through performance. She is also accessing a wide range of archival sources, including from contemporary performers, to trace how narratives about virtuous figures circulated in rural and urban areas. Her findings will be an integral part of her doctoral dissertation on Tamil literature and performance.

Aleksandra Matic

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	The Artists of Nathdwara: Preserving the Tradition of Pichvai Painting
Field of Study:	Art History
Home Institution:	School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Host Institution:	Mohanlal Sukhadia University, Udaipur, Rajasthan
Grant Start Month:	August 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Aleksandra Matic holds a BA in Art History from Lake Forest College and an MA in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, focusing on modern and contemporary art from South Asia, Gender Studies, and Cold War Constellations. During an 18-year tenure at the Art Institute of Chicago, her roles included growing and revitalizing the member and donor travel programs and overseeing the museum’s legacy society as the Associate Director of Donor Travel and the Director of the Buckingham Society. In 2019, she curated an exhibition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago titled Coming into Being- a conversation between nine visual artists which explored questions of identity and the ‘othered’ body using post-colonial theory.

She serves on the Executive Advisory Council, Emeritus Board, for the Educational Travel Consortium. Ms. Matic volunteers for various culture, health, and community-focused organizations, including the Artists of Nathdwara, Core of Culture, and Center on Halsted. She is an active member of The Arts Club of Chicago and the International Museum of Surgical Science. Ms. Matic enjoys travelling, reading, and volunteering in her free time.

This Fulbright-Nehru project in India is a collaboration with a multigenerational collective of pichvai artists in the temple town of Nathdwara. Pichvai are decorative textiles utilized by a Hindu devotional community called the Pushtimarg in their veneration of Lord Krishna. The focus of Ms. Matic ’s proposal involves working with a local filmmaker to produce a documentary based on the lives of these pichvai artists, the history of their painting, and Nathdwara. This documentary will communicate a crucial narrative and create dialogue within a global community to provide the platform needed for future pichvai artists to create and thrive for generations.

Calvin McCormack

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Bio-Sensing Musical Instrument Development for Disabled Persons in Uttarakhand
Field of Study:	Interdisciplinary Studies
Home Institution:	Berklee College of Music, Boston, MA
Host Institution:	Birla Institute of Technology and Science-Pilani, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Calvin McCormack is a musician, audio engineer, and computer programmer from Baltimore, MD. He completed his undergraduate degree in Jazz Studies from the University of Michigan, where he focused on the intersection of jazz improvisation and non-western musical idioms. During this time, he spent two months in Mysuru studying the Saraswathi Veena. He is also a recent graduate of Berklee College of Music, where he received his master’s degree in Music Production, Technology, and Innovation, with an emphasis on the use of bio-sensors and accessible interfaces in musical instrument design. As part of his thesis at Berklee, Mr. McCormack developed software that uses electroencephalogram (EEG) brainwave signals to control digital music generation and sound design. Since 2018, Mr. McCormack has been working with CED Society, a Dehradun-based non-profit dedicated to supporting women in the Himalayan border region. Together with CED Society, Mr. McCormack has helped launch the Sound of Soul Recording Studio and Music Institute, a nonprofit music education center and recording studio designed to empower disadvantaged and disabled women through music education, production skills, and creative expression. Mr. McCormack has also worked as an active musician, music instructor, author of music teaching materials, assistant at a digital fabrication lab, and spent two years as an assistant engineer at Radio Active Productions recording studio in Austin, TX.

Traditional musical instruments have been developed and refined over centuries, but digital instruments are a relatively new technology with great potential for innovation. Mr. McCormack’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to design, develop, and test digital musical instruments that have been created specifically for people with disabilities in remote areas of northern India. The project is using bio-sensors, low-cost computers, and digital fabrication tools to create accessible musical instruments and is studying their efficacy in rural areas, resulting in an enhanced understanding of the design and production of affordable and accessible creative tools.

Addie McKnight

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Contemporary Practices in the Creation of Tibetan Tradition
Field of Study:	Museum Studies
Home Institution:	Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
Host Institution:	Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath, Uttar Pradesh
Grant Start Month:	February 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

As an aspiring museum professional, Ms. Addie McKnight completed a Bachelor in Art History (2014) and an Master in Folklore & Ethnomusicology (2020) at Indiana University-Bloomington with interests in material culture and Tibetan Studies. Through a passion for honoring arts and cultures from around the world, Ms. McKnight has dedicated herself to working in museum spaces with a focus on critical engagement with ethnographic collections and institutional legacies. From a young age, Ms. McKnight felt a personal connection to both the aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities of Tibetan Buddhism. Her academic and professional goals are centered on the representation of Tibetan culture within United States museums. She has studied Tibetan language for the past five years through institutions across three different countries: Indiana University and the American Institute of Indian Studies in the United States, Rangjung Yeshe in Nepal, and the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamshala, India. Ms. McKnight’s experience in museums include research assistantships at Indiana University’s Mathers Museum of World Cultures, an internship at the Himalayan-focused Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, and participation in the Smithsonian Institution’s 2019 Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology (SIMA). Taken together, these experiences have informed her approach to conducting research, communicating with culture-bearers, and facilitating educational experiences within representational spaces.

Through her Fulbright-Nehru research, Ms. McKnight aims to understand how Tibetan artists and arts administrators in Dharamshala, India, present and promote cohesive visions of Tibetan culture and tradition to both Tibetan and other audiences. By conducting interviews, participant observation, and documenting organizational practices at the Norbulingka Institute, Ms. McKnight aims to create a portfolio of educational and curatorial materials to bring to future work in US museums. These materials will help US museums represent their Tibetan collections in ways that address the history, politics, and contemporary practices of Tibetan people.

Abhi Nathan

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Grassroots Governance: A Comparative Study of the Local Government Bodies in Tamil Nadu
Field of Study:	Political Science
Home Institution:	Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
Host Institution:	Loyola College, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Abhi Nathan, originally from Marietta, Georgia, is a graduate of Vanderbilt University, where she earned a BA in Political Science and Medicine, Health & Society. In the summer of 2019, Ms. Nathan completed a congressional internship through the International Leadership Foundation where she focused on health and immigration policy. Her senior honors thesis built on these experiences, examining public policy during the COVID-19 pandemic in six cities across the United States to determine how local, state, and federal policy intersected to affect healthcare outcomes for immigrant populations.

On campus, she served as the President of Vanderbilt’s South Asian Cultural Exchange and chaired the annual Diwali Showcase, one of the largest cultural showcases on Vanderbilt’s campus celebrating the diversity and culture of South Asia. She also led voter registration and civic engagement efforts as a campus ambassador for the non-profit organization Asian Pacific Islander American Vote and the captain of Vandy Taal, a competitive South Asian fusion a Capella team. Following her graduation from Vanderbilt University, Ms. Nathan worked as a consulting analyst at Avascent, a boutique management consulting firm serving government-driven industries. She will be matriculating to Harvard Law School after the completion of her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship.

Ms. Nathan is conducting a research project which investigates the effectiveness of different types of local government bodies in Tamil Nadu. This is being accomplished through a series of case studies of various localities which represent the different types of local governments present in Tamil Nadu along a scale of urbanization (i.e., a gram panchayat, a town panchayat, a municipality, etc.). Through Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Nathan hopes to understand how differences in urbanization and location, among other factors, affect the administrative efficiency and civic engagement rates of these different localities. She is conducting this research under the guidance of the Peninsula Foundation (TPF), a Tamil Nadu-based non-profit think tank that works to reinforce India’s strength as an independent, sovereign nation-state through research on key policy issues.

Persis Naumann

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Tackling Social Stigma: An Ethical Obligation in Healthcare to Involuntary Childlessness
Field of Study:	Interdisciplinary Studies
Home Institution:	Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
Host Institution:	M.O.P. Vaishnav College for Women, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	October 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Persis Naumann is a PhD Candidate and Adjunct Professor at the Center for Global Health Ethics, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, where she also holds a master’s degree in Healthcare Ethics. Her educational background includes a bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from Sathyabama University, Chennai, India. Prior to moving to the U.S., Ms. Naumann taught IGCSE biology at Ghiyasuddin International School in the Maldives.

She is also the founder of Kelir Books LLC in Pittsburgh that produces bilingual Tamil language and cultural resources that represent all types of Tamil families including Tamils living around the globe, multicultural families, and language learners.

As a PhD student her research directly impacts Tamil women and the wider South Asian community. As a professor of ethics, she focuses on the promotion of cultural understanding and ethical decision making in cross-cultural care. In her entrepreneurial endeavor rooted in social responsibility, she equips and empowers parents and families through the complexities of socio-cultural identity in today’s world and advocates for ethical approaches in storytelling, representation, and business practice.

Ms. Naumann has extensive experience in bioethics empirical research including the qualitative research project, “Barriers to involvement in healthcare decision making in advanced cancer care in minority populations”, which was published in the Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics Journal. She has also presented bioethics papers at major regional, national, and international ethics conferences and won several regional and national scholarships.

She worked with the Director of the American Nurse Association (ANA) Center for Ethics and Human Rights on nursing ethics policies, contributing towards ANA’s position statements and publications on gender and culture.

She has been a member of the Advisory Committee at Jeevaratchanai Social Service Organization Chennai, India, for over 10 years and currently provides them with quality and ethics consultation. By volunteering in person at the Jeevaratchanai children’s home and collaborating with the host institution during the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship she will spend time with the girls living there and students at the university, sharing America’s diverse culture and history through music, dance, sports, and food, celebrating the differences, and embracing the similarities in the cultures of America and India, as well as sharing her own travel and migration experience as a Chennai-born girl living in Pittsburgh. As a Global Health Ethicist with interdisciplinary experience, specialized in healthcare ethics research, teaching, practice, and policy, Ms. Naumann continues to contribute to the field of healthcare ethics, particularly at the intersections of class, culture, and gender.

Social stigma associated with involuntary childlessness persists in society – costing people their mental health, their relationships, their careers, and even their lives. Since much of the healthcare and ethics research, discourse, and processes stem from the Global North, they can lack the nuances and complexities that come with specific cultural understanding. This research aims to develop a robust, comprehensive, and culturally relevant ethical framework for sexual and reproductive healthcare by studying the impact of social stigma on healthcare decision making among women with involuntary childlessness in Tamil Nadu.

Through ongoing extensive research, Ms. Naumann is creating frameworks in the intersectional field of ethics, culture, and stigma in relation to healthcare access and decision making; lecturing in the field of healthcare education, raising the next generation of ethical thinkers and doers; and creating a network of culturally competent ethics trainers who will support organizations to address bias, stigma, and discrimination as a healthcare intervention.

Supriya Pandit

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Capturing Desire for Parenthood in India During and After COVID-19
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Host Institution:	Birla Institute of Technology and Science-Pilani, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Supriya Pandit is a recent graduate of Cornell University, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology, Health and Society with minors in Global Health, Human Development, and Gerontology. As an undergraduate, she pursued a wide variety of interests, including human nutrition and reproduction, gender and sexuality, health policy, and ethics. She was also involved in research in molecular nutrition laboratory and pediatric medical practice. She has been a rock-climbing instructor and teaching assistant during her college career. Her work over three years as a resident advisor in an all-women’s dormitory, specializing in sexual violence prevention and response, as well as semester developing an intervention for women experiencing intimate partner violence during the pandemic have reinforced her commitment to gender equity. The culmination of her experiences, both academic and personal, has informed the questions she hopes to ask during her time in India. She hopes to continue her work as a physician and global health researcher. Upon the completion of her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, she plans to pursue graduate study in both medicine and public health. Her interests include running, rock climbing, yoga, and Hindustani classical music.

COVID-19 has had a well-defined impact on sexual and reproductive health services in India, but little is known about the intentions and behavior that underlie the needs for those services. During her Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Pandit is designing a qualitative study about how the pandemic has affected people’s desire for parenthood in the short- and long-term. She plans to conduct semi-structured interviews and focus groups with people of reproductive age, mainly women. Through this project, she hopes to learn more about how this global catastrophe has influenced norms, expectations, and concerns about having children, and to inform India’s family planning landscape as a whole.

Shivani Patel

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Language of Youth: Volunteerism in Palliative Care in India
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Management - Calcutta, Kolkata, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	August 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Shivani Patel graduated summa cum laude from Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY with a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Science with a minor in Chemistry. She is also a 2018 aluma of Upward Bound, a federally funded pre-collegiate program designed to navigate first-generation students toward the path to pursue higher education. As an undergraduate at Marist, Ms. Patel worked as an academic tutor and college prep advisor for the Newbergh/Poughkeepsie Upward Bound Program. For her honors thesis, she worked as a student assistant for the Catskill Hudson Area Health Education Center to redesign Scrubs Club, a pre-health exploration program for disadvantaged, underrepresented, middle-school and high-school students living in medically underserved communities. As an undergraduate, she also served as the Executive Director for the Marist College St. Jude organization, where she led a team of nine executive members and coordinated campus efforts to raise over $43,000 for the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Her initial interest in public health and palliative care arose from her role as a hospice volunteer in her local community. For Ms. Patel, engaging with her community is a reciprocal, moving experience of learning, growing, and giving back. As an aspiring physician, she hopes to nourish a positive outlook on healthcare within her community.

Although India is ranked lower on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Quality of Death Index, Kerala, India is described as a global model for its efforts in expanding palliative-care services. Kerala’s bottom-up organization developed by community and nongovernmental organization collaboration lends itself as a replicable, compassionate-care model. While researchers attribute its success to community organization, less research surrounds the increasing youth involvement in palliative-care. Ms. Patel’s Fulbright-Nehru project is identifying key components of the Indian palliative-care system, conducting empirical research on youth engagement at NGOs in Kerala, and comparatively analyzing palliative-care models throughout India that deviate from the Kerala model. After her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, she aspires to attend medical school.

Samantha Plezia

Samantha (Sammy) Plezia

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Exploring Alcohol Use, Eating Habits, and Body Image Among Indian Adolescents
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	Brown University, Providence, RI
Host Institution:	Goa University, Panaji, Goa
Grant Start Month:	August 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Samantha Plezia is a recent graduate of Brown University where she studied Public Health and Hispanic Studies on a pre-clinical psychology track. Her research interests include eating disorders, global mental health, and strengths-based interventions. She currently works as a Research Assistant at Brown University’s Center for Health Promotion and Health Equity on several studies focused on substance use and sexual health. Most recently, she supported a community-based participatory research study aimed at designing interventions to reduce stimulant-involved overdoses in New England, as well as an intervention study to promote pre-exposure prophylaxis uptake among men who engage in sex work. Prior to this role, she worked as a Research Assistant at Brown’s Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies and Suffolk University’s HEART Laboratory on projects related to nicotine use among LGBTQ+ adolescents and racial disparities in chronic pain care utilization, respectively.

Ms. Plezia’s interest in global mental health first arose after working in Kenya, where she served as a temporary director at a center for survivors of female genital mutilation. She has since completed internships in Mexico City, helping facilitate group therapy sessions with survivors of trafficking, and, most recently, with Project HOPE’s humanitarian aid team in Colombia. Ms. Plezia also volunteered as a medical interpreter for Latin American immigrant patients at the Rhode Island Free Clinic throughout her undergraduate studies.

Through this work, Ms. Plezia’s commitment to supporting individuals who are experiencing mental health concerns has grown significantly. She has brought this passion to her academic coursework, completing independent studies on eating behaviors among communities that have been historically excluded from research. Her undergraduate honors thesis explored the impact of migration on Latin American immigrant women’s eating habits and beauty ideals. Ms. Plezia also recently published her qualitative study on maladaptive eating behaviors, body image, and religion among South Asian individuals. Following her Fulbright-Nehru grant, she hopes to earn her PhD in Psychology and work towards her goal of developing culturally-informed mental health interventions in collaborative and sustainable ways.

While there is a growing body of literature on the harmful association between alcohol use, eating behaviors, and body image among adolescents, the topics remain understudied in India, which is home to one of the world’s youngest populations. Through her Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Plezia aims to use qualitative methodologies to answer the question, what is the relationship between alcohol use, eating behaviors, and body image preferences among Indian adolescents who drink alcohol? Through conducting semi-structured interviews using the principles of culturally sensitive research, Ms. Plezia hopes to illuminate Indian adolescents’ voices and provide insight on the aforementioned health phenomena among the population.

Catherine Ralph

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Increasing Female Agency Among India's Last-Mile Farming Communities
Field of Study:	Economics
Home Institution:	Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA
Host Institution:	O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana
Grant Start Month:	August 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Catherine Ralph is an innovator, explorer, and collaborator with remarkable drive. She grew up in a small, coastal town in Maine before traveling to California for college where she learned to discover her identity outside of her upbringing. Throughout college, Ralph was exposed not only to new people but also to new experiences and avenues for eliciting positive change within her communities.

Ms. Ralph graduated from Santa Clara University with majors in Economics and Political Science because she was inspired by the connection they had to various realms of her life––e.g., her interest in social entrepreneurship and the role that social entrepreneurs have in solving unjust environmental equilibriums while simultaneously working to address social problems––and the duality that allowed her to showcase both her analytical and mathematical skills.

Through Santa Clara University’s Miller Center Fellowship, Ms. Ralph utilized her academic background in behavioral economics to draw larger conclusions about the impact gender interventions can have, and further, how strategy and policy proposals can maximize that impact. She used her analytical skills to develop a portfolio for Oorja Development Solutions––a social enterprise that finances and installs solar mini-grids in rural communities in Uttar Pradesh for irrigation, agro-processing, and cooling––to overcome hindrances to impact investment opportunities through gender-focused integration strategies.

Ms. Ralph was the President of Santa Clara’s outing club, Into the Wild (ITW). Ms. Ralph led with authenticity and pride for being part of such a spectacular organization that thrives off of participants’ awe when they round the corner into Yosemite Valley for the first time, or their giggles during the first night spent in a tent. ITW shapes students’ trajectories at Santa Clara through its ability to foster intimate communities that span beyond weekend trips.

Ms. Ralph defines success as having a community of friends, family, and mentors who comfort her during hardship, amplify her achievements, and challenge her to push her own boundaries.

Persistent cultural biases against fully including women in the formal economy have hindered economic development. Ms. Ralph’s Fulbright-Nehru research project aims to document the impact social enterprises bringing renewable energy by way of solar mini-grids to farms, have on social and gender attitudes in India. When social enterprises mirror the demographic of farmers, women’s employment increases, extending their individual agency and facilitating more progressive attitudes about gender. By harnessing the power of grassroots interventions, social enterprises will positively impact women’s agency and economic development. The broader impacts of Ms. Ralph’s research encourage social enterprises to implement gender interventions, to increase development and scaling potential.

Alexa Russo

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Imagining Agrarian Alternatives: Sustainable Agriculture Cooperatives in India
Field of Study:	Anthropology
Home Institution:	Stanford University, Stanford, CA
Host Institution:	Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Alexa Russo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her PhD project analyzes the growing farmer producer organization/cooperative and sustainable agriculture movements in India, focusing on the role of gender in the imagining and formations of rural economic futures. Ms. Russo began her studies at Amherst College where she received a BA in Economics and Religion (with honors) in 2012. While studying abroad in Bodh Gaya and Banaras, Ms. Russo completed an ethnographic project of worshippers of Hanuman and Sri Lankan pilgrims, and after graduation, co-authored “A Dream Experiment in Development Economics” in the Journal of Economic Education.

Ms. Russo subsequently received a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, in which she conducted ethnographic research of women’s self-help groups in a remote Rajasthani village. In preparation for the fellowship, Ms. Russo began Hindi language learning, and has continued for many years after, reaching a distinguished level of proficiency. After her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Russo worked for three years at J.P. Morgan where she acquired further insights into financial frameworks through analyses of socially motivated institutions as well as financial and non-financial companies. Ms. Russo then received an MSc in Gender (with Distinction) from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2017 and received the Best Performance Prize in her degree. In her master’s thesis, Ms. Russo analyzed how representations of women within a rural Gujarati embroidery cooperative are negotiated across globally circulating discourses on entrepreneurship and third-world “authenticity.” She later published her thesis in The Journal of Law, Social Justice and Global Development. After this program, Ms. Russo expanded her on-the-ground understanding of gender within NGO networks through her work in women’s rights advocacy at Rutgers University’s Center for Women’s Global Leadership. While on Stanford campus, Ms. Russo has been a committed student worker organizer, leading graduate student advocacy on affordable housing, childcare, and other critical services, as well as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. For this work, Ms. Russo received the Stanford University’s 2020 Community Impact Award. She is an avid meditator and recreational yogi, and enjoys her new found hobby as a novice photographer.

Rural India currently faces intersecting economic and ecological crises that have also exacerbated social inequalities. In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Russo aims to analyze how various actors address India’s agrarian challenges through forms of sustainable agriculture, with the cooperative as a key structure of implementation, and women as pivotal agents of change. Ms. Russo aims to investigate how different actors envision sustainable agrarian futures in India as well as the practices and ideals of labor, gender, and sociality that constitute a sustainable cooperative. Her project also analyzes how political alignments, relationships, and positionality within policy networks shape and enable various agrarian imaginings.

Karun Salvady

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Music Listening Interventions on Mental Health Outcomes of Neuropsychiatric Patients
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Karun Salvady is a distinction graduate in Neuroscience from the University of Texas at Austin. He has an extensive research background in translational medicine, drug delivery and pharmaceutics and has worked at some of the premier medical institutes in the U.S. including the Baylor College of Medicine, Dell Medical School, National Institutes of Health and UT Austin College of Natural Sciences during his undergraduate tenure. He has delivered award winning presentations across the world at decorated institutions such as Harvard University, The University of Texas at Austin, Butler University, Qatar University, The National Institutes of Health, The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences and the National Conference on Medicine and Religion. He is also a published scientific author in the field of translational medicine.

Aside from his academic and professional achievements, Mr. Salvady is also a reputed South Indian classical (Carnatic) percussionist, an exponent of the mridangam, and has performed in over 500+ concerts with many of India’s leading musicians across the U.S., U.K. and India. Some of the noted musicians he has accompanied in the field of Indian classical music include Ganesh Rajagopalan (of Ganesh-Kumaresh fame), Flute Raman, AS Murali and Madurai R. Sundar, to name a few. He has also collaborated with musicians from genres such as Western classical, jazz, flamenco and pop, conducted workshops and lecture-demonstrations, recorded for albums and currently teaches South Indian percussion to earnest students in the US. He is currently completing a master’s degree at Goldsmiths, University of London in the unique Music, Mind & Brain program focused on music psychology and the cognitive neuroscience of musical behavior, where he is conducting cutting edge research on the intersection of music and the brain. His interests outside of academics and music include traveling, NBA basketball, food and spirituality.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Student, Mr. Salvady will be working on interdisciplinary research with aims to investigate the impact of South Indian Classical percussion listening on mental health outcomes. This project aims to pioneer efforts in developing a novel music listening protocol using South Indian Classical (Carnatic) rhythms to potentially aid mental health outcomes of neuropsychiatric patients. Cognitive deficits and low mood are common amongst patients with Schizophrenia, Parkinson’s Disease and Stroke recovery. Research has shown that music listening interventions can have beneficial effects on outcomes of mental health, especially on mood and cognition. Carnatic music listening interventions have yet to be experimented, with a particular lack of exploration using the rhythmic components of such music. Combining these approaches may open the way for further investigation in this area.

Aditya Santoki

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Barriers to Cost of Care Discussions for Indian Cancer Patients
Field of Study:	Medical Sciences
Home Institution:	Duke University, Durham, NC
Host Institution:	Pallium India, Kochi, Kerala
Grant Start Month:	August 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Aditya Santoki graduated from Duke University in 2021 cum laude as a Chemistry major. While at Duke, Mr. Santoki was a neurobiology researcher in Dr. Cagla Eroglu’s lab and investigated the rate of neuronal cell death in Huntington’s Disease. Having self-studied computer science in college, Mr. Santoki designed a program that would characterize the rate of neuronal cell delineated by brain region, eventually seeing his work published as a second-author in Cell Reports. Additionally, while at Duke, Mr. Santoki was also deeply involved in health policy research. After having taken an Introduction to the U.S. Healthcare System class with Dr. Nathan Boucher, Mr. Santoki designed an independent project to assess the determinants of vaccine hesitancy in Durham County. As a part of his project, Mr. Santoki interviewed physicians and patients to find that even brief physician-led conversations on the safety and efficacy of vaccines could drastically reduce vaccine-hesitancy. Most importantly, Mr. Santoki learned how effective physician-led conversations on treatment could drastically affect patient care. This sparked Mr. Santoki’s interest in understanding how cost of care conversations on a national scale could reduce financial toxicity for patients. Since then, Mr. Santoki has published his work on vaccine hesitancy as a first-author in the North Carolina Medical Journal (NCMJ).

After graduating from Duke University, Mr. Santoki has been working as a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). At the NIH, Mr. Santoki routinely shadows neurooncologists having cost of care discussions with terminal cancer patients. Through these conversations Mr. Santoki has seen how patients can make much more informed decisions about their care and plan personalized and affordable courses of treatment. Moreover, Mr. Santoki has also been exposed to the potential of personalized medicine while working in Dr. Claire Le Pichon’s lab. While in the Le Pichon lab, Mr. Santoki has been assisting a project characterizing a novel mouse model of a rare form of ALS. Mr. Santoki has also been working part-time at a biopharma venture capital firm investigating drug pricing for rare disease therapeutics. Both these experiences have sparked Mr. Santoki’s interest in translating personalized therapeutics and ensuring they are affordable for patients. In his free time Mr. Santoki enjoys reading, weightlifting, and running.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Mr. Santoki is travelling to medical centers throughout Kerala to survey oncologists treating cancer patients. He is assessing physician awareness of treatment costs and low-cost alternatives. If time permits, Mr. Santoki aims to assess patients’ willingness to pay for genomic assays to define need for adjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer. He is also estimating the proportion of patients who get colitis after starting immunotherapy. These analyses will help physicians determine whether cost conversations on preventative treatments can prevent future expenses.

Adam Shaham

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Mumbai's Mangroves: Assessing Socio-Ecological Roles for Sustainable Conservation
Field of Study:	Environmental Sciences
Home Institution:	Georgetown University, Washington, DC
Host Institution:	Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	August 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Hailing from New York City, Mr. Mr. Adam Shaham graduated with a Bachelor in Science in International Culture and Politics from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in 2022. During his time at Georgetown, Mr. Shaham pursued his combined interests in public service and environmental stewardship in his work inside and outside of the classroom. His self-designed major focused on the intersection of international relations and climate change. Through the four-year Mortara Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Mr. Shaham conducted research on gender, education, and technology policy across the Middle East and was published in the International Journal of Education Development.

Off campus, Mr. Shaham completed internships at the U.S. Department of State and with Nancy Pelosi in the Office of the Speaker of the House. Mr. Shaham’s passion for environmental conservation also led him to volunteer more than 500 hours doing shore bank stabilization, invasive species removal, and fire clearance with AmeriCorps through Conservation Corps Minnesota and Iowa. Mr. Shaham was selected as a National Science Foundation REU intern at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS) in Fall of 2021. While at BIOS, Mr. Shaham developed a species distribution model for coral fish species threatened by invasive lionfish utilizing machine learning software. In his free time, Mr. Shaham loves to run, read bad mystery novels, and devour bagels.

Mangroves serve vital ecosystem functions, including shore stabilization and carbon sequestration. In the last decade, there have been hundreds of mangrove restoration programs globally yet most restorations have failed for lack of community buy-in. Through the Maharashtra Mangrove Cell, 120 km2 of Mumbai’s mangrove habitats have been restored. In order for these restorations to succeed long term, Mr. Shaham’s Fulbright-Nehru project will evaluate the socio-ecological role of Mumbai’s mangroves to identify effective community conservation strategies. Through interviews at restoration sites, this project aims to gauge community perceptions of mangrove forests. Utilizing Maharashtra State Archive records, this project aims to study historic perceptions of Mumbai’s mangroves.

Hashwinder Singh

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Discourses of Azadi: A Historical Analysis of Akali Politics in Punjab from 1945-1984
Field of Study:	Energy
Home Institution:	Georgetown University, Washington, DC
Host Institution:	Presidency University, Kolkata, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	January 2023
Duration of Grant:	Five months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Hashwinder Singh is an aspiring scholar of post-Partition Indian political thought, with a particular focus on the relationship between Nehruvianism and Punjab’s Sikhs. Having recently graduated with a Master’s in Global History from the University of Oxford, and a bachelor‘s from Georgetown University, Mr. Singh is interested in how the state balances its ideological foundations when it pushes against minorities’ ability to engage with their most authentic representation of themselves. Outside of his academic passions, Mr. Singh spends his time reading, watching films and playing basketball.

Through his Fulbright-Nehru project, Mr. Singh seeks to understand the connectivity in discourse between three major periods of Sikh political agitation. Specifically, he is curious about the extent to which there was a coherence in the political rhetoric between Tara Singh (1945-46), Fateh Singh (1962-66) and Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (1980-84). He wants to understand the perceived shortcomings in Congress governance that led Akali Sikhs to believe that they were being neglected. Were Khalistani’s claims of Congress hegemony inherent to the Nehruvian project? Did Sikhs fulfill a social role akin to the Muslim subaltern in the post-Partition nation-state? In sum, Mr. Singh is probing what constitutes belonging within the Nehruvian nation-state.

Tobin Stauffer

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Defining the Medic’s Role in Cross-Cultural Mental Healthcare
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD
Host Institution:	Christian Medical College, Ludhiana, Punjab
Grant Start Month:	August 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Tobin Stauffer is a Master of Arts in Liberal Arts candidate at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD. Through St. John’s Great Books Program, Mr. Stauffer became interested in how the cultural perception of mental illnesses are shaped through literature and philosophy. As a former medic in the United States Army, Mr. Stauffer has noticed the different perceptions of mental illnesses between cultures. He is aware of the limitations of western mental healthcare treatments and seeks to better understand how to provide culturally-appropriate treatment to areas deficient in mental healthcare professionals.

Prior to graduate school, he received a Bachelor’s in Chemistry and Biology from Florida Atlantic University (FAU). At FAU, he worked as a tutor and teacher’s assistant with the chemistry, biology, and mathematics departments. Since then, he has served as a reviewer for the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program on combat casualty care and regenerative medicine. Mr. Stauffer spent the last year as a K-2 literacy coach with Americorps in Baltimore, MD. When he is not working, he enjoys reading literary fiction, writing poetry, surfing, and spending time with family, friends, and his cat, Nuna.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Mr. Stauffer is investigating the mental healthcare system in Punjab, India and examining how local psychiatrists provide equitable care for the diverse patient population. This project consists of nine months of physician interviews and observations throughout rural and urban settings for a comprehensive understanding of Punjab’s culturally relativistic approach to mental healthcare. He aims to compile his results into a list of case studies intended to guide non-mental healthcare.

Jackson Stephenson

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	The Afterlife of Indian Esoteric Buddhist Poetry in India Today
Field of Study:	Art History
Home Institution:	University of California: Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA
Host Institution:	Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath, Uttar Pradesh
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Jackson Stephenson is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and his dissertation focuses on Esoteric Buddhist and Hindu poetry. He received his bachelor’s degree from Humboldt State University in Religious Studies, and his master’s degree in International Studies from University of Washington. Mr. Stephenson’s research focuses on the place and use of different Indian languages within Esoteric Buddhist and Hindu texts. While in India, he will be researching the “afterlife” of Esoteric Buddhist poetry in modern day bhakti communities. During this trip Mr. Stephenson plans to study Hindi intensively. He has spent extensive time in India and Nepal to study language, primarily Sanskrit, Bengali, and Tibetan, and also has facility with Prakrit and Apabhraṃśas. In the summer of 2018, he worked as Resident Director for the Critical Language Scholarship program in Kolkata, and he also regularly teaches courses at UC Santa Barbara on Buddhism and Jainism.

Mr. Stephenson has published his research on Esoteric Buddhist poetry in two peer-reviewed articles: “Love me for the Sake of the World” (2020) and “Bliss Beyond All Limit” (2021). In these articles Mr. Stephenson examined the place and use of two different genres of Apabhraṃśa verses within Esoteric Buddhist texts, showing that these verses function as both guideposts and catalysts for key experiences and junctures within Buddhist rituals. Mr. Stephenson is currently working on another article on Apabhraṃśa verses within Kashmir Śaiva texts, where these obscure verses are sung by goddesses to express ineffable and mystical teachings.

Mr. Stephenson is also interested in South Asian writing systems, inscriptions, manuscripts, and calligraphy. He wrote one of his master’s theses’ on the use of the Indic Siddhamatrika script throughout Asia, especially in Japan where it continues to be used for liturgical purposes in Shingon Buddhism. While in India Jackson also plans to take calligraphy lessons, focusing on the Siddhamatrika and Bengali scripts, in addition to ornate styles of Devanagari. Jackson also loves Indian street food.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar, Mr. Stephenson is doing fieldwork for his dissertation, which explores the formal and thematic influences of medieval Buddhist poetry on modern-day bhakti communities. Mr. Stephenson is translating from key texts in Sanskrit and Apabhraṃśa while also travelling to important regions for his dissertation archive, including Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, and Bihar. Mr. Stephenson is also studying regional vernaculars and consulting manuscript collections in India, in addition to reading with pundits.

Meredith Stinger

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Digital Identities in a Pandemic: Aadhaar & Implications for Access to COVID-19 Resources
Field of Study:	Anthropology
Home Institution:	Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR
Host Institution:	Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh
Grant Start Month:	February 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Meredith Stinger has a Bachelor’s in Sociology & Anthropology with a minor in Political Economy from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR. After graduating, Ms. Stinger was an Americorps VISTA member at a Portland nonprofit, building and managing community relationships to broaden educational opportunities for underserved students of color. As an undergraduate, she was an editor for the Synergia Journal of Gender and Thought Expression, studied abroad in India, and was awarded honors for her senior thesis research in 2019.

Prior to the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Stinger has worked as a Program Coordinator for an equity-focused education nonprofit, specializing in graphic design, marketing and data management. Ms. Stinger enjoys drawing, design, sewing and running in her spare time.

Ms. Stinger’s Fulbright-Nehru research explores the role that India’s Aadhaar biometric identification system has played in accessing healthcare resources throughout the COVID-19 pandemic as well as in efforts to track the virus through contact tracing. The use of biometrics and digital identification for resource allocation and contact-tracing is a topic of international discussion and funding, with high-stakes implications for those navigating these new systems. Ms. Stinger seeks to engage in this international discourse through research on how Indian citizens pursue state healthcare resources in the midst of a major public health crisis, and how their strategies are facilitated and/or impeded by the Aadhaar program.

Maya Taylor

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Prescribing Gender: Affirming Care in the Wake of Mandated Surgical Intervention
Field of Study:	Gender Studies
Home Institution:	Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
Host Institution:	St. Xavier s College, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Maya Nashva Lyon Taylor graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in Public Health and Asian Studies and a minor in Spanish. In her time as a student, she was a Research Assistant in Dr. Gilbert Gonzales’ LGBTQ+ health laboratory. Ms. Taylor’s specific interest in the health of bisexual folks, like herself, led her to study how having a same-sex or opposite-sex partner could impact the mental health, physical health, and substance use of bi+ folks across the United States. Under Dr. Gonzales’ mentorship, Ms. Taylor published a paper that encapsulated this work entitled, “Health Disparities Among Women by Sexual Orientation Identity and Same-Sex or Different-Sex Cohabiting Partnership Status” in the journal Women’s Health Issues.

While taking a semester to study in Delhi, Ms. Taylor began studying how the 2019 Transgender Persons Protection of Rights Act mandating folks to get surgery in order to change their legal gender marker was affecting trans and other gender diverse folk in India. She spoke to several trans activists and medical providers and documented their experiences. Ms. Taylor plans to continue and expand this work during her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship. In the last year of college, Ms. Taylor wrote a thesis applying medical sociology theories of historical trauma to the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. As a part of her thesis, she wrote a short story about an Indian doctor treating patients dying of HIV/AIDS in New York City whose physician parents lived through the Partition and participated in mass sterilization campaigns of the Emergency era. After graduation, Ms. Taylor worked as a Health Educator at the Center on Halsted, a social service agency in Chicago, providing HIV testing, PrEP Navigation, and Care Coordination for her clients in English and Spanish. In her free time, Ms. Taylor loves to try cooking new dishes, playing instruments, and going for hikes.

Under the 2019 Transgender Person’s (Protection of Rights) Act, discrimination against trans people is criminalized. Despite these protections, the Act requires trans/gender diverse Indians to undergo surgery before they can legally change their gender. This study aims to determine how the Act impacts the health of transgender communities by investigating how legal documentation of gender shapes access to health resources, how healthcare providers are held accountable for providing high quality gender-affirming care, how trans and gender diverse people hope to change this Act to better reflect their needs, and how this Act impacts gender diverse visibility in society.

John (Ike) Uri

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Assembling the Adapted City: Consultants and Technocratic Climate Planning in Urban India
Field of Study:	Sociology
Home Institution:	Brown University, Providence, RI
Host Institution:	Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. John Uri is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Brown University. He earned his BA in Sociology from the University of Kansas in 2017, before serving as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Tajikistan. He earned an MA in Sociology at Brown University in 2020. For his master’s thesis, Mr. Uri conducted interview-based research in India, working to understand how climate adaptation – efforts to reduce vulnerability to climate change – occurs in Indian cities. Such efforts are often funded by international donors, and that project illustrated how consultants, positioned between these donors and local urban officials, are a necessary part of urban adaptation planning in India. With the support of this Fulbright grant, Mr. Uri’s dissertation research will focus on these consultants and their role in urban climate adaptation, considering adaptation efforts in the city of Mumbai.

Apart from these primary research interests, Mr. Uri has conducted research at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conferences (the UN climate negotiations). In this capacity, Mr. Uri has considered the negotiations from a critical perspective, paying particular attention to the topics of climate finance and adaptation, as well as the nascent issue of loss and damage.

Cities in India face intensifying risks from the climate crisis, necessitating climate adaptation (actions and policies that reduce climate vulnerability). Urban adaptation planning is increasingly common in India, often carried out by consultants. This Fulbright-Nehru project intends to focus on these consultants, who coordinate the interests of international donors and urban officials. Using ethnographic research methods, Mr. Uri aims to embed himself in a firm in Mumbai that provides these services. The goal of this project is to better understand the ‘best practices’ of urban adaptation planning and how international norms and features of local governance impact those practices.

Thomas Varner

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	The Iron Curtain: Impacts on Arsenic Mobility along the Banks of the River Hooghly
Field of Study:	Geology
Home Institution:	University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX
Host Institution:	Science and Technology, Shibpur, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	February 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Thomas Varner, Originally from Northern Indiana, graduated from the School of Engineering at the University of Mississippi with a B.Sc. in Geology in 2018. During his time as an undergraduate in Mississippi, his interest in the natural processes that shape our planet’s surface flourished while investigating the extent of uranium decay in detrital zircons to unravel the ancestral pathway of the Mississippi River. These research endeavors led to Mr. Varner receiving the Who’s Who Award at the University of Mississippi and directed Mr. Varner towards graduate research addressing water-related issues impacting societies across the globe.

Mr. Varner is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at San Antonio where his research focuses the transportation of arsenic along tidally fluctuating river systems in Bangladesh, a region where millions of people are negatively impacted by elevated concentrations of arsenic in the underlying aquifers used for drinking purposes. Facets of Mr. Varner’s research have been presented at numerous conferences including the Geological Society of America, American Geophysical Union, Goldschmidt, and the International Congress & Exhibition on Arsenic in the Environment. The culmination of Mr. Varner’s research, titled “Contribution of Sedimentary Organic Matter to Arsenic Mobilization along a Potential Natural Reactive Barrier (NRB) near a River: The Meghna River, Bangladesh” was published in Chemosphere. Mr. Varner is passionate about investigating the occurrence and transportation of inorganic and organic contaminants in drinking water systems with an aim to provide options for in-situ remediation in natural environments.

Mr. Varner, as part of the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, is researching a naturally occurring phenomena along the tidally fluctuating Hooghly River leading to the precipitation of iron in the adjacent sediments which may protect the river and aquifer from the cross-contamination of arsenic and other pollutants. This phenomenon is known as the “Iron Curtain” and is the result of the surface water-groundwater mixing within the sediments surrounding the river. The results from this study will be compared to the subsequent findings from a similar study along the Meghna River in Bangladesh. Together, these studies will be used to develop a universal river-aquifer contaminant transport model.

Theo Whitcomb

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Politics of Adaptation: Development, US-India Internationalism, and the Climate Crisis
Field of Study:	Development Studies
Home Institution:	University of Redlands, Redlands, CA
Host Institution:	Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Theo Whitcomb is a writer and journalist from Southern Oregon. He has covered land use and natural resource politics for over two years, focusing on water, law enforcement, and cannabis agriculture. His writing has been published in national and regional magazines. In 2019, while in India, he began researching and writing about river restoration and land use in Chennai – a subject topic which the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship will continue to support this year.

While in South India for the second time, Mr. Whitcomb is interested in understanding how multinational companies, local social movements, and investors are shaping the politics, economics, and ecology of the region. His research will focus on studying the challenges and politics of Chennai to navigate a disaster-prone climate. To do this, he will work with scholars at the Madras Institute for Development Studies.

Working with scholars at Chennai’s Madras Institute for Development Studies, Mr. Whitcomb’s Fulbright-Nehru research focuses on the politics and infrastructure of ‘climate adaptation.’ He is interested in how multinational companies and international development investment is shaping the politics, economics, and ecology of the Coromandel coast.

Sofya Yuditskaya

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	South Indian Noise Music Practitioners: Toward a Widely Applicable Globalized Music Theory
Field of Study:	Music Composition
Home Institution:	New York University, New York, NY
Host Institution:	Srishti Manipal Institute of Art Design and Technology, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	September 2022
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Sofya Yuditskaya is a site-specific media artist, curator, and educator working with sound, video, interactivity, projections, code, paper, and salvaged material. Her work focuses on techno-occult rituals, street performance, and participatory art. Ms. Yuditskaya’s performances enact and reframe hegemonies, she works with materials that exemplify our deep entanglement with petro-culture and technology’s effect on consciousness. She has worked on projects at Eyebeam, 3LD, the Netherlands Institute voor Media Kunst, Steim, ARS Electronica, Games for Learning Institute, The Guggenheim (NYC), The National Mall and has taught at GAFFTA, MoMA, NYU, Srishti, and the Rubin Museum. She is a PhD Candidate in Music Composition at NYU GSAS.

Ms. Yuditskaya Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on an in-depth, detailed and immersive study of global Noise Music through the lens of the remarkable contemporary Indian contribution to it. Noise Music is vitally important to understand its global forms, structures and driving forces. In today’s measured world, it embodies a fulcrum of technology, chaos, and the sublime. Living and studying in Bangalore offers her a deep insight into the ways that South Indian artists listen to and construct Noise Music. Ms. Yuditskaya aims to develop a rich vocabulary for talking about, and teaching Noise, in the framework of traditional music and in conversation with U.S. musical output.

Tara Seekins

Grant Category:	Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching Research Program
Project Title:	Another World Is Not Only Possible, She Is On Her Way: Women’s Voices in Contemporary Indian Literature and Film
Field of Study:	Education
Home Institution:	Tamalpais High School Mill Valley, CA
Host Institution:	Indraprastha College for Women, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	February 2023
Duration of Grant:	Three months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Tara Seekins teaches English at Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, California. She has served as a school leader, an English instructor in the college program at San Quentin State Prison, and as a lecturer in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley. Ms. Seekins has a National Board certificate in English language development and was part of the 2015 Fulbright-Hays delegation that traveled to China. Each of these experiences has reinforced her belief in the transformative power of education as well as intensified her passion for developing culturally relevant curricula, collaborating with colleagues across the globe, and encouraging students to become engaged citizens of the world.

Ms. Seekins holds a bachelor’s degree from Smith College, a master’s degree in English from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and both a master’s degree in education and a law degree from UC Berkeley.

Ms. Seekins’s Fulbright inquiry project is exploring gender representation in contemporary Indian literature and film and has a curriculum guide and instructional unit for secondary English teachers. The guide and instructional unit are focusing on women’s voices in contemporary Indian literature through university coursework and interviews with students and professors; collaborations with Indian educators to support cross-cultural dialogue; and site visits to locations of cultural and literary importance. This will form one of the cornerstones of a newly developed course on world literature that concentrates on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice.

Michael Whalen

Grant Category:	Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching Research Program
Project Title:	Adapting to the Social Emotional Impact of Poverty and Pandemic in India
Field of Study:	Education
Home Institution:	Kearsley High School Flint, MI
Host Institution:	Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	February 2023
Duration of Grant:	Five months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Michael Whalen is a teacher at Kearsley High School in Flint, Michigan, where he has taught for eight years. During his time with Kearsley Community Schools, he has served as the Student Council advisor and as the Social Studies Continuous Improvement chair, and has made presentations on professional-development topics such as technology use in the classroom and on the electronic lesson planning and resources offered by the Michigan Department of Education. Mr. Whalen served as an elected member of the Mt. Morris Board of Education for 11 years, was an administrative intern with the Kearsley High School leadership team, and was one of 24 teachers in Michigan selected to serve as a representative on Michigan’s Teacher Leadership Advisory Council.

Mr. Whalen received his master’s degree in educational policy and leadership from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a bachelor’s degree in social studies education from the University of Michigan in Flint, and earned a minor in Finnish education and pedagogy while studying at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

For his Fulbright project, Mr. Whalen is exploring how India’s secular and non-secular schools are adapting to the social emotional impact of trauma caused by issues such as the COVID pandemic and poverty. In this area, he has been identifying strategies for inspiring self-awareness, self-reflection, and mindfulness in trauma-impacted youth which can then be shared with local and regional communities. Additionally, Mr. Whalen has been identifying various stakeholders that have successfully leveraged social emotional programming to positively impact student outcomes.

Taryn Williams

Grant Category:	Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching Short-Term Program
Project Title:	School Curricula and Assessment Reimagined: Implementing New Approaches in Delhi Schools
Field of Study:	Education
Home Institution:	Lake and Peninsula School District Perryville, AK
Host Institution:	Delhi Board of Secondary Education, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	April 2023
Duration of Grant:	Six weeks

Brief Bio:

Ms. Taryn Williams is currently a head teacher and secondary generalist with the Lake and Peninsula School District in remote Alaska. She is a former Fulbright Fellow to Germany and a Kathryn Davis Fellow for Peace at Middlebury College. This past summer, she was a WWI Fellow through the National Endowment for the Humanities at the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City. Ms. Williams also serves as her district’s student government advisor and as treasurer of her local National Education Association.

Ms. Williams got her BS in urban studies (with a focus on urban education) from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 and her MSEd in elementary education from the same university in 2015; she also earned a certification in K-12 TESOL. Additionally, she completed a certificate through the Strategic Leadership in Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania in 2021.

Her goal for her Fulbright DAST in India is to share and compare knowledge about the best practices in curriculum and assessment design, and learn about Indian culture. She is also teaching people about the unique and beautiful location she calls home: the Alaskan bush.

Meher Ali

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program (DDRA)
Project Title:	Imagining the University, Constructing the Nation: Higher Education in South Asia
Field of Study:	Energy
Home Institution:	Princeton University Princeton, NJ
Host Institution:	Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	July 2023
Duration of Grant:	Two months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Meher Ali is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University. At Princeton, she has been an organizer for the South Asia Graduate Workshop and the South Asia Digital Humanities Working Group, as well as a co-founder of the South Asia Translation Workshop. She was previously a Fulbright student researcher in Kolkata, India, and her work has also been supported by the AIIS language fellowship, the CLS program, and the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies. She received her MA from the University of Chicago and her BA in history with honors from Brown University.

Ms. Ali’s dissertation project traces the history of the public university and higher education in modern South Asia. By taking a capacious definition of the university — as, for example, a product of state policy, an icon of modernity, a material campus, and a site for politicization — her research engages multiple historiographical fields and methods including the history of global development, urban history, architectural history, oral and social history, and ethnographies of the state.

Carolisa Watson

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program (DDRA)
Project Title:	Diaspora and Placemaking among Tibetans in Exile in Dharamsala
Field of Study:	Geography
Home Institution:	University of Kansas Lawrence, KS
Host Institution:	Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath, Uttar Pradesh
Grant Start Month:	June 2023
Duration of Grant:	Ten months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Carolisa Watson is currently pursuing a PhD in geography at the University of Kansas. Her research revolves around questions of placemaking, home, and identity. She is engaged in collaborative ethnographic work with displaced communities. Ms. Watson has previously received FLAS funding to study Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese languages. She holds bachelor’s degrees in East Asian languages and literatures and in global and international studies from the University of Kansas; she also holds an MA in folklore and ethnomusicology from Indiana University.

Ms. Watson’s Fulbright-Hays project is examining how Tibetan identity is expressed through placemaking in Dharamsala and the ways in which place and identity interact. As a visiting scholar, Ms. Watson is involved in archival and ethnographic fieldwork exploring the relationships between Tibetans, Dharamsala, and the governmental organizations, and how they impact the Tibetan diaspora in Dharamsala; the project is being carried out by studying the historical, contemporary, political, and social contexts of “territorialized exile” in a city. It is also drawing upon an interdisciplinary background in geography, folklore, religious studies, and media studies to understand how individuals interact with their larger communities and the city itself to create meaningful places and express collective and individual identity.

Rebecca Waxman

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program (DDRA)
Project Title:	What Constitutes Violence Against Women? Rape in Late Colonial and Postcolonial India
Field of Study:	Energy
Home Institution:	Clarkson University Los Angeles, CA
Host Institution:	Ambedkar University, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	January 2023
Duration of Grant:	Seven months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Rebecca Waxman is a PhD candidate at UCLA in the Department of History, specializing in South Asia and with a concentration in gender studies. Her work aims to study occurrences of sexual and gender-based violence that marked turning-point moments in colonial and postcolonial Indian social, political, and feminist histories. Ms. Waxman received her BA in history with a certificate in South Asian Studies from Wesleyan University in 2016, where she wrote her honors thesis historicizing the Delhi Gang Rape of 2012. Her work has been published in Women’s History Review and A Cultural Encyclopedia of Lost Cities and Civilizations (forthcoming).

Ms. Waxman’s dissertation project historicizes the relationship between the interpersonal, violent act of rape and the broader Indian society and politics, exploring how colonial categories and dynamics shaped understandings and legislation of female sexuality and of sexualized violence in British and independent India. It also studies the continuities and discontinuities between colonial and postcolonial India regarding rape. Ms. Waxman’s research endeavors to illuminate key nodes in the complex heterogeneous history of sexual violence in modern South Asia in order to recuperate the subjecthood of Indian women who enter the archive in moments of violation; it also aims to question the dominant knowledge structures informing the subjugation of women.

Anjana Mishra

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship Program
Project Title:	Globalization, COVID-19, and the Empowerment of Women: A Case Study of Chikan Embroiderers of Lucknow
Field of Study:	Politics and International Studies
Home Institution:	Florida International University Miami, FL
Host Institution:	University of Lucknow, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh
Grant Start Month:	September 2023
Duration of Grant:	Three months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Anjana Mishra is assistant teaching professor in the Department of Politics & International Relations, School of International and Public Affairs, Florida International University (FIU), Miami. She joined FIU as an adjunct professor in 1998. Prior to that, she taught at the University of Lucknow and NSN Degree College, Lucknow, India. At FIU, she teaches courses on South Asia, development studies, and global issues. Dr. Mishra’s research interests include issues related to the Asian Indian diaspora, gender, development, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. She is currently editing a book, Politics and Culture in the Developing World. Dr. Mishra is active in the South Florida community and is a member of the Miami Dade County Asian Advisory Board; she is also the secretary, executive board member, and founding member of the Miami Association of Indian Americans for Culture and Arts.

Prof. Mishra’s interdisciplinary project for the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Award involves a survey exploring the impact of globalization and COVID-19 on the empowerment of chikan artisans – Urdu-speaking, Muslim women – living in the city of Lucknow. Using quantitative and qualitative research methods, this study is assessing the improvement, decline, or status quo in the empowerment of these women in the face of threat from machine-made Chinese chikan fabric and the more recent challenge presented by the loss of wages and health issues arising from the pandemic-related lockdown.

Sunila Kale

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship Program
Project Title:	Potters and Policy: The Political Economy of Artisanal Labor in India’s Informal Sector
Field of Study:
Home Institution:	University of Washington Seattle, WA
Host Institution:	Savitribai Phule Pune University, Mangaluru, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	November 2023
Duration of Grant:	Three months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Sunila S. Kale is associate professor of international studies at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching focus on Indian and South Asian politics, energy studies, the political economy of development, and the history of capitalism. She is the author of Electrifying India (Stanford, 2014), Mapping Power (OUP, 2018), and “Rural Land Dispossession in China and India” (Journal of Peasant Studies, 2020). She completed her BA from the University of Chicago and her PhD from the University of Texas.

In 2020, India’s Railway Ministry announced that the railways would resurrect the practice of selling chai (tea) to its millions of customers the old-fashioned way, in kulhads, the small mud-clay cups that are meant to be used once and discarded. Prof. Kale’s Fulbright research asks whether and how policies such as the kulhad program support and reproduce modes of informal, artisanal work that persist despite developmental ideologies that have long predicted their demise. In her project, she is focusing on small-scale, labor-intensive informal production in urban India by looking at the work of traditional potters, or kumbhars, in western India.

Abhijeet Paul

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship Program
Project Title:	Retting and Writing: Jute, Sustainability, and Community in India
Field of Study:	Anthropology
Home Institution:	University of California at Berkele Berkeley, CA
Host Institution:	West Bengal State University, Kolkata, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	July 2023
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Abhijeet Paul is lecturer in South and Southeast Asian studies at UC Berkeley and lecturer in ethnic studies in the Peralta Community College District. He is also affiliated faculty in the Contemporary Center on India, a research body at UC Berkeley. Dr. Paul teaches and researches South Asian, ethnic, and global studies, specializing in environmental justice and humanities, South Asian and Asian-American literatures and cultures, as well as environmental media. He is currently a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow affiliated with West Bengal State University researching the jute community, environmental justice, and globalization for a monograph to be completed in 2023–24. He has published several articles on: jute culture, ecology, and community; digital community and fakes; and biopolitics and seed sovereignty. He has made presentations in numerous conferences in India, the US, and Europe, and has been interviewed by the National Public Radio of Washington, D.C., and New Philosopher of Australia. He plans to premiere his film, Bhatti (The Kiln) in India in 2022. He has a PhD in South and Southeast Asian studies with a designated emphasis on critical theory from UC Berkeley and a PhD in English (American literature) from the University of Calcutta. His first Fulbright experience was as an Indian doctoral researcher in the US, and the second as a Fulbright-Nehru US scholar in India. He loves to travel and meet people.

Jute, Bengal’s “golden fiber”, is rooted in sustainability and well suited to local agroecologies; its cultivation has the potential for carbon sequestration and soil restoration, while jute products are environmentally friendly and compostable. Dr. Paul’s Fulbright-Hays project is exploring the local, cultural, and community aspects of jute’s reinvention as a green commodity in order to understand sustainability practices, climate change, and the challenges of adapting to new technologies. The project is examining the many roles of the jute plant in the oral and written cultural forms of India and South Asia. These self-representations by farmers and workers complement and complicate the scientific-technological narratives of agroecology, diversification, and global jute marketing.

Jerry Anthony

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Kalam Fellowship
Project Title:	“Sustainable Urbanism: Challenges and Opportunities in India.”
Field of Study:	Urban Studies and Planning
Home Institution:	The University of Iowa Iowa City, IA
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur, Kharagpur, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	January 2023
Duration of Grant:	Seven months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Jerry Anthony, PhD, FAICP, is a global changemaker. Anthony has a bachelor’s degree in Architecture, a master’s degree in Town Planning, and a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning. He is a tenured faculty member at the School of Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Iowa, a Carnegie-1 and AAU institution in the US

Dr. Anthony teaches courses in Sustainable Development, Housing Policy, Land Use Planning, Urban Growth Management, and International Planning. He has been named an Excellent Educator by the American Planning Association. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 2015-2019. He has won numerous teaching awards at the University of Iowa. Students consistently rate his courses very highly, regard him as an outstanding teacher, and describe his classes to be life-transforming.

Dr. Anthony’s research interests are in housing policy and land use planning in the US and international contexts. His current research projects include a) the effects of high housing costs on economic growth in the largest U.S. cities, b) the rebuilding of the American city of Cedar Rapids after a devasting flood, c) methods to increase the replacement of traditional wood-burning cookstoves (chulhas) in India, and d) climate change responsive urbanism in India. He was named a HUD Urban Scholar in 2002. His publications are widely read, with a 2004 paper titled “The Effects of Florida’s Growth Management Act on Housing Affordability” named one of the top 10 most influential papers published in the Journal of the American Planning Association in 25 years. His research has been funded by numerous entities, including the Brookings Institution, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the US Department of Housing & Urban Development.

In 2003, he co-founded the Housing Trust Fund of Johnson County that to date has distributed about $12 million to help build over 900 reasonably-priced homes in Iowa. In 2019, Dr. Anthony was given the University of Iowa’s Michael J. Brody award for Excellence in Service.

In 2020, Dr. Anthony was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners – the highest honor for urban planners in the U.S.

Cities are significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Fortunately, cities are better resourced financially than rural areas, bring together people with varied skills and are crucibles for innovation. These advantages could be combined to facilitate sustainable urbanism. Many scholars believe that the war to stave off catastrophic climate change will be won or lost in cities. Much of the world’s urban population lives in the global South, where cities are expanding rapidly. Modifying the development patterns of these cities while they are growing affords significant opportunities for a sustainable future for humankind. Dr. Anthony, in his Fulbright-Kalam project, plans to document the climate change mitigating efforts of several Indian cities, assessing their effectiveness, and exploring their transferability to cities in other countries.

Ravindra Duddu

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Kalam Fellowship
Project Title:	Modeling Ice-Rock Avalanches using Computationally Efficient Schemes (MIRACLES)
Field of Study:	Engineering Mechanics
Home Institution:	Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	December 2022
Duration of Grant:	Five months

Brief Bio:

Originally from India, Dr. Ravindra Duddu got his BTech in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Subsequently, he obtained his MS and PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Northwestern University. After that he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics and Columbia University in the City of New York. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Vanderbilt University, with secondary appointments in Mechanical Engineering and Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Dr. Duddu’s research interests and work experience are in the area of computational solid mechanics with an emphasis on fracture mechanics and multi-physics modeling of material damage evolution. His research is interdisciplinary and spans the disciplines of engineering mechanics, earth and environmental sciences, applied mathematics, and scientific computing. Specific application interests include: fracture of glaciers ice and ice shelves, delamination of fiber reinforced composites, and corrosion/fracture of metal alloys. He is an author on 35 peer-reviewed journal articles with more than 1000 citations, and has a h-index of 16. He has generated more than $1.5 million in grants from federal agencies and industry, and has mentored several post doctorate, graduate and undergraduate students in his research group.

Dr. Duddu is a recipient of the US National Science Foundation CAREER award and the Royal Society International Exchanges travel award. He also received the Junior Faculty Teaching Fellowship at Vanderbilt University and the US Office of Naval Research Summer Faculty Fellowship. He is a member of ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute, American Geophysical Union, and United States Association for Computational Mechanics.

The goal of Dr. Duddu’s Fulbright-Kalam project is to expand and strengthen collaborations between his research group at Vanderbilt University and the faculty and students of the Center of Excellence (CoE) on Subsurface Mechanics at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM). The project’s research aim is to develop state-of-the-art computationally efficient schemes for solving fracture mechanics problems encountered in Earth, Environmental and Energy Sciences, through a combination of teaching (seminars and short-courses) and research activities (involving PhD students) at the CoE. These schemes will be tailored to study the plausible mechanisms triggering ice-rock avalanches and identify the vulnerabilities of Himalayan glaciers.

Alan Fryar

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Kalam Fellowship
Project Title:	Identifying recharge signals in spring flow on the Shillong Plateau, Meghalaya (India)
Field of Study:	Hydrology
Home Institution:	University of Kentucky Lexington, KY
Host Institution:	North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, Meghalaya
Grant Start Month:	January 2023
Duration of Grant:	Four and half months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Alan Fryar received his BS in Geology and History from Duke University in 1984, his MS in Geology from Texas A&M University in 1986, and his PhD in Geology from the University of Alberta (Canada) in 1992. From 1992 to 1995, he was a Research Associate in the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin. Since 1995, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Geological Sciences (now Earth and Environmental Sciences) at the University of Kentucky, where he is currently a Professor. He teaches courses in hydrology, hydrogeology, and environmental geology. He has graduated eight PhD and 17 MS advisees.

His current and recent research projects include groundwater flow and chemistry in karst regions of Morocco and China; occurrence of arsenic in floodplains of the Ganges and Mekong rivers; transport of bacteria in karst aquifers in Kentucky; and groundwater-stream interactions in major river valleys in Kentucky. Dr. Fryar was the principal investigator for two projects, funded by the US Department of State, to build capacity for graduate education in hydrology in Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia. He has also received grants from the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, the US Geological Survey, and the state of Kentucky. He has authored or co-authored 64 papers in international scientific journals, 13 conference papers, four book chapters, six book reviews, and essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Earth Magazine, and International Educator.

Dr. Fryar is a fellow of the Geological Society of America (GSA) and past chair of its hydrogeology division. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union, the International Association of GeoChemistry, the International Association of Hydrogeologists (IAH), and the National Ground Water Association. He is book review editor of the journal Groundwater and former co-editor of the journal Environmental & Engineering Geoscience. He was a Fulbright Specialist to Pakistan (December 2009–January 2010) and India (February-March 2017) and a Fulbright Scholar to Morocco (January-May 2014). He received the International Service Award from the IAH US National Chapter and the GSA Hydrogeology Division Distinguished Service Award.

Studies of how climate change affects water resources in India have emphasized changes in monsoon rainfall and stream flow. The sensitivity of springs, which are important water sources in rural mountainous areas of northern India, to climate and land use/cover changes has received less attention. Dr. Fryar’s Fulbright-Kalam project proposes to study how karst (limestone) springs on the Shillong Plateau respond to rainfall. He intends to review existing data and reports; select springs for sampling; deploy sensors that record water level, temperature, and chemistry for at least one year; and identify timing and sources of recharge. These activities will be coordinated with local stakeholders.

Jason Strother

Grant Category:	South and Central Asia Regional Research Program
Project Title:	The Impact of Climate Change on People with Disabilities in India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives
Field of Study:	Climate Change
Home Institution:	Montclair State University Upper Montclair, NJ
Host Institution:	Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha
Grant Start Month:	January 2023
Duration of Grant:	Three months

Brief Bio:

Mr. Jason Strother is a multimedia journalist and educator. As an independent reporter, Mr. Strother has filed stories from dozens of datelines for media outlets like NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC World Service. Much of his career was spent covering affairs on the Korean Peninsula and he sent dispatches from both sides of the DMZ. But in 2021, Mr. Strother returned to New Jersey to shift his reporting to stories that concern disability and accessibility, a beat that is often ignored or misunderstood in mainstream journalism. He then launched Lens15 Media, a news agency that focuses on the disability angle in every story. Mr. Strother’s work is informed by his own experience of having a low-vision impairment.

Mr. Strother is also an adjunct professor at Montclair State University, where he has created several electives in the School of Communication and Media. That includes a course on how people with disabilities are portrayed in the entertainment industry, journalism, and the social media. He has also been involved in cross-campus initiatives to make media and the arts more accessible. Mr. Strother holds an MA in international relations from the Brussels School of International Studies and a BA in broadcasting from Montclair State University. He has also earned a certificate degree in entrepreneurial journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Mr. Strother has won grants from the National Geographic Society, the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, and the NJ Civic Information Consortium.

People with disabilities are disproportionately affected by climate change and disasters. Approximately 15 per cent of the world’s population has a physical, sensory or developmental impairment and as instances of severe weather phenomena increase, so do the risks posed to this already vulnerable community. In his Fulbright project, Mr. Strother is examining how emergency systems can be made more accessible to people with disabilities. During his sojourns in India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, he has been searching for ways to bring down barriers that limit this population’s inclusion in responses to catastrophic events.

U.S. Fulbrighters

USIEF funded Fulbright-Nehru Grants

Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)

Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)

Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching)

Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Scholar Fellowship

Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program