Lauren Bausch

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	The Vedic Philosophy of Language and Causality
Field of Study:	Art History
Home Institution:	Dharma Realm Buddhist University, Ukiah, CA
Host Institution:	Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	July 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Lauren Bausch teaches at Dharma Realm Buddhist University, located in the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah, California. A specialist in the philosophy of the Brāhmaṇa texts, she is interested in exploring the relationship between Vedic tradition and early Indian Buddhism. She is the editor of Self, Sacrifice, and Cosmos: Vedic Thought, Ritual, and Philosophy (2019) and has written articles such as “The Kāṇva Brāhmaṇas and Buddhists in Kosala”, “Philosophy of Language in the Ṛgveda”, and “Bráhman as the Absolute in Late Brāhmaṇa Texts”. She completed her PhD in Sanskrit from the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2015.

Including a life-changing undergraduate semester in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Delhi and three semesters of dissertation fieldwork at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Prof. Bausch has been to India to study languages, conduct research, deliver lectures, and to volunteer. She has given invited lectures at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the National Museum, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Savitribai Phule Pune University. She received the first annual International Association of Sanskrit Studies’ Honorary Research Fellowship in 2019 and organized a Vedic conference at Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune.

Prof. Bausch looks forward to building a community of scholars and practitioners that facilitates collaboration among Vedic and Buddhist specialists in the United States and India. She hopes that the book resulting from this Fulbright-Nehru research touches its readers by revealing something about their roots and will also give scholars of Hinduism a more comprehensive understanding of Vedic tradition and scholars of Buddhism a sound basis for understanding the cultural background of Gotama’s teachings.

Prof. Bausch’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the philosophy of language and causality that is articulated in middle and late Vedic texts. She is identifying and examining the discourses within these texts around the nature of man and the absolute creating itself to experience relativity, while situating the philosophy of the Brāhmaṇa texts in the intellectual history of India. Rather than interpreting ritual activity through the lens of Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta, her research is probing the cosmologies, mythologies, and explanatory connections found throughout the Brāhmaṇa texts themselves. The results are expected to shed more light on the relationship between late Vedic thought and early Buddhism.

Gil Ben-Herut

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	A History of Speaking: Scripture, Authority, and Artifact in Kannada Devotional Poems
Field of Study:	Art History
Home Institution:	University of South Florida, Tampa, FL
Host Institution:	Kuvempu Institute of Kannada Studies, Mysuru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	September 2023
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Gil Ben-Herut is an associate professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. He holds a PhD in religious studies from Emory University and a BA and MA from Tel Aviv University in Israel. His research interests include premodern religious literature in the Kannada language, South Asian bhakti (devotional) traditions, translation in South Asia, and programming in digital humanities.

His book, Śiva’s Saints: The Origins of Devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Ragaḷegaḷu (Oxford University Press, 2018), is the first study in English of the earliest Śaiva hagiographies in the Kannada-speaking region, and it argues for a reconsideration of the development of devotionalism as associated today with the Vīraśaivas. The book received the Best First Book Award for 2019 from the Southeastern Medieval Association and the 2020 Best Book Award from the Southeastern Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. Dr. Ben-Herut also received the Faculty Outstanding Research Achievement Award from the University of South Florida for the year 2020.

Dr. Ben-Herut recently completed co-translating selections from the Ragaḷe hagiographical collection for a book-length publication (under review). This project is funded by the American Academy of Religion’s Collaborative International Research Grant. His publications include a co-translation of a twelfth-century Kannada treatise about poetics, encyclopedic entries, a co-edited volume, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles. Dr. Ben-Herut is the co-founder of the Regional Bhakti Scholars Network, a platform for facilitating scholarly conversations about South Asian devotional traditions.

Utilizing his extensive experience in computer programming, Dr. Ben-Herut also leads several digital humanities projects, including digital ROSES and BHAVA. He is a member of the Digital India Learning Committee of the American Institute of Indian Studies and an active collaborator in digital projects about South Asian texts and languages involving open-source and open-access environments.

The textual “biography” of the vachana corpus – an expanding collection of devotional and lyrical poetry in Kannada from the twelfth century – spans over several key moments in the history of South India, starting with an innovative devotional practice of personal oral proclamations and then developing into a written canon that served as the fulcrum for a new religious sect, until finally becoming a cultural tool for biting social critique in the modern period. Dr. Ben-Herut’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining how, nine centuries after their appearance, the vachanas became the most cherished literature in Kannada and an exemplar of sorts for spiritual poetry around the world.

Manish Chalana

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Toward an Equitable and Inclusive Heritage Conservation in India: The View from Delhi
Field of Study:	Architecture
Home Institution:	University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Host Institution:	School of Planning and Architecture, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	January 2024
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Manish Chalana, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington, with adjunct appointments in Architecture and Landscape Architecture in the College of Built Environments. He is also an affiliate of the South Asia Center in the Jackson School of International Studies (JSIS). His work engages with urban planning through the lenses of historic preservation, international planning and development, and equity and social justice. He is also the director of the Graduate Certificate in Historic Preservation and co-directs the Center for Preservation and Adaptive Reuse (CPAR) which strives to connect the academia to the practice of historic preservation. Additionally, he is the membership chair of the National Council for Preservation Education (NCPE). Dr. Chalana’s scholarly contributions have been substantial, including two co-edited volumes. The first, titled Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia (with Jeffrey Hou, Hong Kong University Press, 2016), goes beyond the mainstream discourse in exploring the complexities of urbanism in Asian cities. The second volume, Heritage Conservation in Postcolonial India: Approaches and Challenges (with Ashima Krishna, Routledge, 2021), critically examines heritage conservation in the context of India’s postcolonial society. Additionally, he has published on topics of urban planning and historic preservation in a variety of academic journals, including the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of Heritage Stewardship, Planning Perspectives, Journal of Planning History, and Journal of the American Planning Association.

Dr. Chalana’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the state of historic preservation, or “heritage conservation”, in India, focusing on its inclusivity and equity aspects. The project is primarily examining the representation of sites associated with underrepresented communities in the historical record and is assessing their management and interpretation on the ground. Additionally, the project is investigating the types of histories and memories that may have been lost for sites where physical evidence no longer exists. The study’s emphasis is on Dalits, non-elite Muslims, Sikhs, women, and non-binary groups.

Meenakshi Chandra Sekar

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Improving Patient Care by Empowering Community Pharmacist in India
Field of Study:	Allied Health
Home Institution:	University of Findlay, Findlay, OH
Host Institution:	Vignan Pharmacy College, Vadlamudi, Andhra Pradesh
Grant Start Month:	December 2023
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Dr. M. Chandra Sekar obtained his BPharm and MPharm from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India. Then he earned a PhD at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and completed his postdoctoral work from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Following this, Dr. Sekar was a researcher at the University of Alabama in Birmingham where he made significant contributions to the area of phosphoinositide signaling.

Dr. Sekar then served as a pharmacist at the University of Cincinnati Hospital in Ohio for seven years before joining the University of Findlay as an associate professor in pharmaceutical sciences in 2007. He was promoted to full professor with tenure in 2013 and now also serves as the International Ambassador for Pharmacy Education for the University of Findlay. Earlier, in 2010, he started a study abroad program that enabled student and faculty exchanges between the University of Findlay and pharmacy colleges in India. Over the past decade, 40 students from each country have availed of this opportunity.

Dr. Sekar’s commitment to improving pharmacy practices in India has been recognized by the Indian Pharmacist Association – by bestowing him with the M.L. Khorana Memorial Award in 2018 and electing him as a fellow of the association in 2019. Dr. Sekar’s other honors include: being a fellow of the American Pharmacists Association; winning the B.M. Mittal Memorial Award from his alma mater, BITS; and winning the David L. Allen award for holistic teaching.

In his Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Sekar is studying the impact of pharmacist involvement in improving patient outcomes for hypertension and diabetes.

Colette Copeland

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Traversing Boundaries – Contemporary Female Artists of India
Field of Study:	Arts
Home Institution:	University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX
Host Institution:	National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, Gujarat
Grant Start Month:	September 2023
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Colette Copeland’s artistic and pedagogical practice is critically engaged with a symbiotic, diverse range of aesthetic and cultural values which emphasize interdisciplinary and collaborative work. As an established visual artist, her work has been featured in 28 solo exhibitions and 155 group exhibitions/festivals spanning 35 countries over the past 30 years. Her work as a visual artist and cultural critic/writer examines issues surrounding gender, identity, death, and contemporary culture. She sources personal narratives, historical texts, and popular media, utilizing video, photography, printmaking, performance, dance, text, audio, sculptural installation, and community activism to question societal roles, gendered violence, and the pervasive influence of media and technology on communal enculturation. She is interested in artists, including the conceptual kind, whose work deviates from traditional disciplines and training and who use non-traditional materials and processes in their work, such as in sculptural installation, performance, video, relational aesthetics, and social practice/collaborative activism.

Ms. Copeland received her BFA from Pratt Institute in New York and her MFA from Syracuse University. She has taught at six institutions over the past 20 years, each with diverse, global student populations. At the University of Pennsylvania, she developed and taught a new interdisciplinary visual studies major that incorporated visual arts, critical theory, humanities, and social sciences. Currently at the University of Texas at Dallas, she teaches an interdisciplinary “Fluxus-inspired” contemporary practices studio course, digital photography, and performance art.

Since 2001, Ms. Copeland has been writing for a variety of art publications and institutions like The Photo Review, Fotophile, Afterimage, Exposure, Ceramics: Art and Perception, Arteidolia, Glasstire, and Eutopia. She has 116 published articles to her credit. Most recently, she published two catalog essays – “Avery, A Family Legacy” and “Re-emergence: Women AbEx and Color Field Artists”. She is a long-time member of AICA-International Association of Art Critics.

Ms. Copeland’s Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on qualitative research about underrepresented female visual artists from India, whose work explores themes of boundaries – physical, emotional, real, imagined, geographical, virtual, convergent, divergent, and transformative – using conceptual and contemporary multimedia art practices.

David Ghertner

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Blockchain Urbanism: Digital Property and the Assetization of the Indian Countryside
Field of Study:	Geography
Home Institution:	Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
Host Institution:	Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Sancoale, Goa
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Prof. David Ghertner received his BA from Colby College and MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University where he previously served as the director of the South Asian Studies Program. He is the author of Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life (Duke University Press, 2020) and Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country (Cornell University Press, 2021). His research expertise lies in urban geography, and he has published widely on informal housing, property rights, urban aesthetics, and environmental governance. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

A series of digital property reform programs are currently spreading across rural India, utilizing drone mapping and digital technologies to map, title, and enclose landholdings. Digitized property rights are deemed essential to fighting poverty and fostering rural development, but also face technical and political challenges that vary by region and land tenure. The translation of customary rights, bordering of land, and construction of data infrastructure depend upon complex bureaucratic work. Through ethnographic research involving engineers and bureaucrats who are implementing the reforms in Goa and Delhi NCR and by interacting with residents impacted by these reforms, Prof. David Ghertner’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring how digital property is reconstituting landownership in India.

Gopal Krishnan

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	An Empirical Analysis of Audit Quality of Indian Firms Affiliated with Business Groups
Field of Study:	Accounting/Finance
Home Institution:	Bentley University, Waltham, MA
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	October 2023
Duration of Grant:	Three months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Gopal Krishnan is a trustee professor of accountancy and the coordinator of the PhD program in accounting at Bentley University. Before joining Bentley, he was the chair of the Accounting Department at Kogod School of Business, American University, Washington, D.C. He has also taught at Lehigh University and George Mason University. He is a chartered accountant, certified public accountant, and a certified management accountant. Professor Krishnan is cited in the Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers for his teaching excellence. His research addresses issues concerning auditor independence and audit quality, corporate governance and earnings management. He has published 80 articles in accounting and finance journals, including Accounting, Organizations and Society, Contemporary Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, Review of Accounting Studies, Journal of Banking & Finance, Journal of the American Taxation Association, Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, Accounting Horizons, Journal of Management Accounting Research, and Journal of Business Ethics. His work has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Accounting Today, CNBC.com, Reuters, CFOWorld, and CFO.com. His co-authored article on a synthesis of audit-quality literature was awarded the 2016 Best Paper Award by the Auditing Section of the American Accounting Association. He was a senior editor of Accounting Horizons and holds a PhD from the University of North Texas.

Business groups (BGs) are dominant forms of industrial organization in India. For example, BG-affiliated firms account for 67 per cent of the total Bombay Stock Exchange market capitalization. However, despite the importance of BGs in India, there is a paucity of empirical research on the quality of audits of firms affiliated with BGs. Prof. Krishnan’s Fulbright-Nehru project is conducting an empirical study of the audit quality of Indian firms which are affiliated with BGs. Specifically, the study is examining whether there is a difference in audit quality between Indian firms affiliated with BGs and those that are unaffiliated (standalone firms).

Pamela Lothspeich

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Raslila: The Play of Lord Krishna
Field of Study:	Area Studies
Home Institution:	The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC
Host Institution:	Jawaharlal Nehru University, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	February 2024
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Pamela Lothspeich is associate professor of South Asian studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she has been teaching since 2008. She is a literary scholar and cultural historian whose work intersects with epic studies, performance studies, gender studies, and postcolonial studies. She has published extensively on modern iterations of Indian epics, particularly as they appear in Hindi literature, theatre, and film. Her previous research project was on the Radheshyam Ramayan and the theatre of Ramlila. Her books include Epic Nation: Reimagining the Mahabharata in the Age of Empire (OUP, 2009) and the co-edited volume, Mimetic Desires: Impersonation and Guising across South Asia (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022). She has also guest-edited the special issue, “The Field of Ramlila”, in the Asian Theatre Journal (Spring 2020).

Formerly, she taught at Michigan State University (2004–08) and Chicago University (2003– 04). She holds a PhD in South Asian studies and comparative literature from Columbia University (2003) and an MA in Asian languages and literature from the University of Washington (1996).

Dr. Lothspeich’s research project is on Raslila, an Indian performance genre spanning theatre, dance, music, and ritual, which enacts stories about the Hindu god Krishna and the goddess Radha. Many stories in the tradition emphasize Krishna’s youthful antics and loving interactions with his devotees. Raslila is related to other forms of devotional theatre, especially the Ramlila centered on the Hindu god Ram. This project aims to provide fresh insights into Raslila in all its material social, political, and aesthetic contexts, and also into its intertwined history with Ramlila.

Preetha Mani

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Tamil New Poetry, Indian Literature, Poetic Modernism
Field of Study:	Literature
Home Institution:	Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
Host Institution:	Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Preetha Mani received her BA from Tufts University and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Mani is associate professor of South Asian literatures in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) and core faculty member in the program in comparative literature at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method (Northwestern University Press and Permanent Black, 2022). Her research expertise lies in modern Hindi, Tamil, and Indian literatures, and she has published widely on issues of translation, women’s writing, and feminism in India; literary realism and modernism; postcolonial studies; and world literature. She has also published translations of Hindi and Tamil literature, autobiography, and criticism into English. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, American Institute of Indian Studies, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Fulbright.

Dr. Mani’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining Tamil new poetry, a form of modernist free verse that became popular in 1950s’ magazines and set a benchmark against which later poets defined their work. By the 1980s, new poetry writing had democratized the poetic form. Exploring new poetry’s development in print culture, she is proposing that this genre was a primary avenue for writers to cross ideological boundaries and to draw inspiration from each other and from writers in other Indian and world languages. Dr. Mani’s research is attempting to demonstrate that rather than being a linguistic outlier to the national canon, Tamil new poetry was a means for generating ideas for a postcolonial pan-Indian literature built on the poetic form.

Vasanthy Narayanaswami

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Potential to Understand Alzheimer’s Disease Etiology Using Guinea Pig Cholesterol Transport Protein
Field of Study:	Biology
Home Institution:	California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA
Host Institution:	Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Hyderabad, Hyderabad, Telangana
Grant Start Month:	January 2024
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Vasanthy Narayanaswami is a professor of biochemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). She obtained her PhD in chemistry (biochemistry) from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, did a postdoctoral training as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany, and a research associateship at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research work involves investigating the role of apolipoprotein E (apoE), the cholesterol transport protein, in relation to cardiovascular ailment and Alzheimer’s disease (AD), two major global biomedical issues. She employs a combination of biochemical, molecular, and cell biological, as well as spectroscopic approaches to examine the role that dysfunctional high-density lipoprotein (HDL) (aka “the good cholesterol”) plays in cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. She also studies the role of oxidative stress on HDL biology and its function in the amyloidogenesis process in AD brains at the molecular and cellular levels. Besides, her research group evaluates the use of HDL nanodiscs as drug-delivery and targeting vehicles.

Dr. Narayanaswami has over 75 publications in peer-reviewed journals, several with students as co-authors. In 2017, she received the title of Fellow of the American Heart Association (FAHA) from the American Heart Association (AHA) for her meritorious contributions and commitment to AHA’s mission. She has received several awards and honors in recognition of her research and scholarly activities. Noteworthy among these are the 2020 Faculty Research Award from the California State University Program for Education and Research in Biotechnology and the 2020 CSULB Outstanding Professor Award.

Dr. Narayanaswami is an ardent advocate of equity and diversity in biomedical research and directs several federally funded programs that are designed to enhance equity, diversity, and inclusion in research.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Narayanaswami is addressing the etiology of AD. She is engaged in investigating the physiochemical aspects of amyloid plaque formation, a hallmark feature of AD, using the sophisticated mass spectrometry and imaging tools at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Hyderabad in India. This project has significance also because it calls for combining forces and initiating collaborations between two major educational and research organizations.

Kathleen O’Reilly

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Time after Time: Capturing Women’s Domestic Work and Leisure in Rural India through Audio Diaries
Field of Study:	Geography
Home Institution:	Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
Host Institution:	St. John’s Medical College, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	July 2023
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Kathleen O’Reilly is a professor in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University and is its presidential impact fellow. She has over 25 years of research experience in gender, and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions in rural and urban India. She is trained as a feminist geographer, ethnographer, and South Asia scholar. Her qualitative research on gender norms has identified new information regarding the negative influence of these norms on physical, environmental, social, and sexual stressors related to WASH. Over the course of her career, she has sought an in-depth understanding of internal community and household dynamics when it comes to control and access to resources, like time and toilets, for women and the socially marginalized groups. Her research highlights the need to understand the complexities of social relations and sanitation policy as they pertain to spatial patterns of inequality in WASH. Recently, she created and taught short workshops on best practices for research on sensitive topics based on her ethnographic research in India. Her work has been funded by, among others, the National Science Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She has also published in such prestigious journals as Geoforum, Health & Place, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Environment & Urbanization, Water Security, and World Development.

In rural India, where conditions require women’s intensive, unpaid domestic work, it is urgent to study how it reproduces gender inequality; this will also add to the global knowledge on unpaid labor’s gendered impact. Dr. O’Reilly’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the workloads of unmarried and married rural young women; the latter living in matrilocal or patrilocal households. Despite evidence that access to leisure time contributes to women’s well-being, a large gap remains regarding young women’s leisure activities in rural India. This project is attempting to fill that gap by analyzing the gendered geographies of domestic labor and leisure. It is also making a methodological contribution by recording the work and leisure conditions of populations with low literacy through audio diaries.

Mary Rader

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Seeking Hidden Archives
Field of Study:	Library Science
Home Institution:	University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
Host Institution:	Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	January 2024
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Mary Rader is currently the South Asian studies librarian and the head of the Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team at the University of Texas (UT) Libraries. She received her BA in art history from Kalamazoo College, her MA in international studies (with a South Asia focus) from the University of Washington, and her MLS from the University of Texas; throughout all three programs, she conducted language training in Tamil and Hindi/Urdu and was an American Institute of Indian Studies Language Fellow (Tamil) as well as a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow (Hindi).

Before coming to UT, Ms. Rader held similar positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Michigan, and Chicago Public Library. As a South Asian studies librarian, her work inherently focuses on content from and about all South Asian countries, in all formats, in all disciplines, and in all South Asian languages. Finding collections that have hitherto been ignored or hidden and making them publicly available is a particular focus of her efforts. A national leader in cooperative collection development efforts for South Asian studies, she regularly partners with the South Asian Materials Project (SAMP), the South Asian Open Archives (SAOA), and other collaborative initiatives.

Ms. Rader’s project is seeking and documenting “Hidden Archives” in Delhi and in Chennai. The goals are to locate personal and private archives housed outside of academic and public domains and to document the content and condition of these collections. The study is setting the groundwork for future preservation and discovery of these materials. Beyond traditional deliverables (publications, grant proposals, bibliographic tools), this research will deepen networks for future and ongoing inter-institutional and international relationships between collectors, scholars, and librarians of South Asia.

Nikhila Raol

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Investigating the Role of Ankyloglossia in Breastfeeding Difficulties
Field of Study:	Medical Sciences
Home Institution:	Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA
Host Institution:	Osmania Medical College, Hyderabad, Telangana
Grant Start Month:	September 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Nikhila Raol is currently an associate professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery and pediatrics at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She practices pediatric otolaryngology, with a focus on pediatric feeding and sleep disorders; she also trains residents and fellows. Dr. Raol received her medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas and her master’s degree in public health from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. Her research primarily focuses on the management of pediatric feeding disorder, with an emphasis on the healthcare burden associated with the condition; she is also looking into the prevention of conversion of acute pediatric feeding disorder to chronic pediatric feeding disorder. Besides, she is involved in research on treatment of refractory obstructive sleep apnea and serves as the site principal investigator for the National Institutes of Health-funded study looking at cognitive outcomes in children with Trisomy 21 undergoing upper-airway stimulation for obstructive sleep apnea. In addition to the National Institutes of Health, her research has been funded by the American Society of Pediatric Otolaryngology, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Marcus Foundation. Dr. Raol has published articles in several leading otolaryngology journals, including JAMA Otolaryngology, Journal of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, and The Laryngoscope.

Dr. Raol’s Fulbright-Nehru project is evaluating the role of ankyloglossia, or tongue tie, in the successful maintenance of breastfeeding in Telangana, India. As part of her research, she is conducting observational field studies and interviews with mothers and clinicians who manage mother–infant dyads. Apart from contributing to scholarship on strategies for successful maintenance of breastfeeding, this research will contribute to the development of evidence-based breastfeeding recommendations worldwide.

Sunanda Sanyal

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Kolkata’s Public Statues: From the Colonial to the Populist Era
Field of Study:	Art History
Home Institution:	Lesley University, Cambridge, MA
Host Institution:	Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	December 2023
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Originally from India, Dr. Sunanda Sanyal is currently a professor of art history and critical studies at the College of Art & Design of Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has been teaching at this institution since 1999. He has a PhD in art history from Emory University (2000), an MFA in art history from Ohio University (1993), and an MFA in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego (1990).

Dr. Sanyal’s research interests include contemporary artists from former colonies in global discourses, and politics of representation and identity. He has chaired panels on contemporary artists of color at various conferences, including those of the College Art Association, the African Studies Association, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, and the American Council of South and Southeast Asian Art. He has published articles and reviews of contemporary art in journals and contributed chapters to volumes of essays on art history and criticism. Some of his publications are: “Critiquing the Critique: El Anatsui and the Politics of Inclusion”, World Art (Routledge); “‘Being Modern’: Identity Debates and Makerere’s Art School in the 1960s”, A Companion to Modern African Art (Wiley-Blackwell); and “Teaching Art History at an Art School: Making Sense from the Margin”, Transforming Classroom Culture: Inclusive Pedagogical Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan). In 2009, Dr. Sanyal produced and directed a two-part documentary film, A Homecoming Spectacle, on the visual culture of Durga Pujo in Kolkata, focusing on the involvement of contemporary artists in the décor of the festival. Currently, he is also serving as a content fellow for SmartHistry.org; besides, he is working on a book project on a history of civic statuary in Kolkata, India.

Dr. Sanyal’s Fulbright-Nehru project is constructing a historical narrative across three phases of Kolkata’s civic statuary: the colonial commemoration of prominent men of the British Raj; the post-Independence celebration of the leaders of Indian freedom struggle; and the current populist trend of statues of cultural celebrities. This comparative inquiry of the three phases is tracing the evolving role of this genre of public images in shaping Kolkata’s visual and political landscapes. The aim is to locate points of overlap and divergence that illuminate the dual role of Kolkata’s public statues as both aesthetic markers and tools of political identity.

Leslie Shampaine

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Exploring Methodologies of Arts Education in India: With a Focus on Digital Storytelling
Field of Study:	Film/Cinema Studies
Home Institution:	At-Large, At-Large
Host Institution:	St. Xavier s College, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	March 2024
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Leslie Shampaine has been telling stories throughout her professional life, from the ballet stage where she performed across the world during a 13-year career, to the television screen where she has produced award-winning programs for PBS, Discovery Channel, A&E, CBS, and Al Jazeera.

Her background in the arts led her to produce and direct the feature documentary, Call Me Dancer, in 2023. The film has received critical acclaim and an award from the New York Women in Film & Television for Excellence in Documentary Directing.

Ms. Shampaine’s work includes cultural and educational programming. For eight years, she was part of the production team that created the biographical films for the Emmy Award-winning Kennedy Center Honors. She was senior production executive at Al Jazeera English in Washington, D.C., where she managed current affairs programming in North America, including the award-winning investigative series, Fault Lines and People & Power, and the discussion programs, The Stream, Upfront, and Empire.

Ms. Shampaine produced the PBS programs One World: India; Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness and Meaning; and Avoiding Armageddon. Her other productions include Who Betrayed Anne Frank (Discovery Channel) – winner of a Telly, a Cine Golden Eagle, and a Gold Remi at the Houston World Fest; DC Cupcakes (TLC); the Smithsonian Networks series’ Seriously Amazing Objects; and Fireworks (A&E, with George Plimpton), which was nominated for an Emmy and an ACE.

She has continued to work as a teaching artist to youth from underserved backgrounds and to seniors with physical disabilities. She has taught dance to children at the Lighthouse for the Blind; worked with seniors to record their personal stories for NPR’s StoryCorps; and taught movement to people with Parkinson’s disease through Dance for PD.

Ms. Shampaine’s Fulbright-Nehru project is seeking to understand the methodologies of arts education with a focus on digital storytelling as it is directed toward underserved youth. Her research is looking at the blossoming of the digital format and how it is impacting storytelling, teaching, communication, and most significantly, participation in a worldwide community. Besides, she is starting the social-impact stage of her film project, Call Me Dancer, to create culturally relevant videos targeted toward youth, to be used by teachers and arts educators. She is also creating short-form videos with curriculum guides for teachers who engage students in meaningful examinations of relevant social issues.

Meenakshi Singh

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Thermal Effects in Quantum Materials and Devices
Field of Study:	Physics
Home Institution:	Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Meenakshi Singh is a condensed matter experimentalist with her research focused on macroscopic quantum phenomena, quantum coherence, and quantum entanglement. She received her PhD in physics from Pennsylvania State University in 2012. She went on to work at Sandia National Laboratories on quantum computing as a postdoctoral scholar. At Sandia, she worked with a team focused on developing deterministic counted ion implants for quantum computing.

Since 2017, she has been an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the Colorado School of Mines. Her research projects include measurements of entanglement propagation, phonon physics in quantum dots and donors in semiconductors, and thermal effects in superconducting hybrids. Her research work in these areas has been published in more than 20 peer-reviewed journal publications and cited more than 900 times. She is the recipient of the prestigious CAREER award (2021–2026) from the National Science Foundation. Dr. Singh is also involved in nationwide educational efforts to build a quantum workforce through curriculum development, alliance building, and workshop organization. At the Colorado School of Mines, she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in digital electronics and microelectronics processing.

Through this Fulbright-Nehru award, Dr. Singh aims to achieve research, pedagogical, and cultural objectives. The research objective is to perform cutting-edge thermal measurements that can bring new insights into our understanding of fundamental physics in quantum materials and devices and thus catalyze novel applications. The pedagogical objective is to establish a graduate-student exchange program between the Colorado School of Mines and the Indian Institute of Science. Through student exchange, she expects the researchers at the two universities to collaborate on quantum information science research while training the “quantum workforce” of tomorrow. As for her cultural objective, it involves harnessing the two countries’ shared interests in quantum information science to engage in meaningful cultural exchange.

Jeffrey Withey

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)
Project Title:	Development of New Environmental Host Models for Enterotoxigenic E. Coli and Campylobacter
Field of Study:	Biology
Home Institution:	Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
Host Institution:	ICMR-National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases, Kolkata, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	October 2023
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Jeffrey Withey received a BA in biology from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD in cellular and molecular biology from the University of Michigan. He also did postdoctoral work in bacterial pathogenesis at the University of Michigan. In 2006, he joined the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology, and Immunology at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit and now holds the rank of professor.

Prof. Withey’s research has focused on enteric bacterial pathogens, primarily Vibrio cholerae, the cause of human cholera. He has studied the regulation of V. cholerae virulence and identified factors in the human gut that can enhance or suppress virulence. In recent years, the focus of Withey’s lab has moved to studying environmental reservoirs for V. cholerae and other human pathogens, including Shigella, Salmonella, and the adherent-invasive E. coli. To facilitate these studies, he has developed models for these enteric bacterial pathogens in a natural aquatic host, the zebrafish (Danio rerio).

In his Fulbright project in India at the National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED), Prof. Withey is developing new environmental models for Campylobacter and Enterotoxigenic E. coli in zebrafish, together with his Indian collaborators. These pathogens cause millions of cases of severe diarrhea per year, both in the developing world and in the U.S. In particular, childhood diarrhea in the developing world is highly associated with stunting, which can cause lifelong effects on health. The environmental life cycles of these pathogens are poorly understood and the goal of the research is to determine how they survive and thrive in environmental niches such as fish. Wild fish, both from nearby waterbodies and from fish markets, are also being examined to determine if major human enteric pathogens are carried in their guts. The long-term goal of these studies is to facilitate bioremediation to reduce or eliminate the major causes of diarrhea in the developing world.

Bopaya Bidanda

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Increasing Industrial Engineering Impact via Frugal Engineering & an Interactive Doctoral Colloquium
Field of Study:	Engineering
Home Institution:	University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
Host Institution:	National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Gandhinagar, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	December 2023
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Bopaya Bidanda is the Ernest E. Roth Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. He returned to the faculty in 2021 after over 21 years as department chair. His recent books include The Business of Humanity (Routledge), Virtual Prototyping & Bio Manufacturing in Medical Applications (second edition, Springer), The Evolution of Project Management (PMI Press), and the Maynard’s Industrial & Systems Engineering Handbook (sixth edition, McGraw Hill) that serve as the definitive corpus of knowledge in industrial engineering.

Dr. Bidanda is the former president of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers and has also served as the president of the Council of Industrial Engineering Academic Department Heads. Besides, he has served on the international advisory boards of universities in India and South America. Moreover, he has had visiting professorships in Singapore and Turkey. Dr. Bidanda is also a fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers and a member of the ABET Board (of Delegates). Besides, he served on the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET for almost a decade.

He received the 2012 John L. Imhoff Award for Global Excellence in Industrial Engineering given by the American Society for Engineering Education. He has also received the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies’ 2012 Global Award for Excellence in Engineering Education and the 2013 Albert G. Holzman Distinguished Educator Award given by the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers.

Dr. Bidanda also helped initiate and institutionalize the Engineering Program on the Semester at Sea voyage in 2004. Most recently, he has been actively engaged in the Business of Humanity project in Pittsburgh and India. In addition, his Manufacturing Assistance Center initiative that provides meaningful careers to those at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid, including to convicted felons and homeless veterans, now has multiple international locations.

Dr. Bidanda’s Fulbright-Nehru project is working towards accomplishing three objectives: interact closely with the industrial engineering doctoral students and new faculty at the National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai, and throughout India via an interactive doctoral colloquium; explore the nascent field of frugal engineering; and monitor a workforce development-based research project in Gujarat. These activities are expected to further develop and hone the scholarship and research capabilities of industrial engineering students and faculty.

Indranil Biswas

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Discovering Novel Antibiotics from Red Soil Bacteria in Southern India against ESKAPE Pathogens
Field of Study:	Medical Sciences
Home Institution:	University of Kansas, Kansas City, KS
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	December 2023
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Neelima Chauhan

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Neurologic Music Therapy
Field of Study:	Neuroscience
Home Institution:	University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL
Host Institution:	Nirma University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat
Grant Start Month:	July 2023
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Neelima Chauhan obtained her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in life sciences with physiology and biochemistry majors, and a bachelor’s degree in education and psychology from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India. After migrating to the U.S., she received her postdoctoral training in neurotoxicology at Oregon Health Science University and in molecular neurobiology and neurodegeneration at Loyola University Chicago.

After successful completion of postdoctoral trainings, she obtained an independent joint position as assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and as research biologist with Veterans Affairs (VA). She then became an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics at UIC where she also served as a faculty for the graduate program in neuroscience. Besides, she worked as the neuroscience program director at Jesse Brown VA Medical Center.

Dr. Chauhan has directed research projects funded by VA and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in translational neuroscience, with a major focus on Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic brain injury. She has presented over 100 abstracts and published over 50 peer-reviewed articles, over six reviews, and more than five book chapters. She has also served on the editorial boards of many neuro-biomedical Journals.

Besides, Dr. Chauhan has served on various institutional administrative committees including the Institutional Biosafety Committee and the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. She has also served as a reviewer on RRD6 VA MERIT REVIEW Study Section and on NIH Grant Study Sections. She is a member of many professional societies such as the Society for Neuroscience, the American Society for Neurochemistry, and the International Society for Alzheimer’s & Dementia.

Dr. Chauhan’s Fulbright-Nehru project is evaluating the therapeutic potential of Indian classical music – by virtue of its unique melodic/rhythmic structure – in treating age-associated neuropsychiatric disorders.

Karen Daniels

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Mechanics of Granular Materials
Field of Study:	Physics
Home Institution:	North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	September 2023
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Karen Daniels is a distinguished professor of physics at North Carolina State University. She received her BA in physics from Dartmouth College in 1994, taught middle and high school for several years, and then pursued a PhD in physics from Cornell University. After receiving her doctorate in 2002, she moved to North Carolina to do research at Duke University and then joined the faculty at NC State in 2005. In 2011–2012, she received an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship which allowed her to spend the year conducting research at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany. She has served as chair of the American Physical Society Division on Soft Matter, and as divisional associate editor for Physical Review Letters, and currently serves on the editorial board of the Annual Reviews of Condensed Matter Physics. She is also a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Her main research interests center around experiments on the non-equilibrium and nonlinear dynamics of granular materials, fluids, and gels. These experiments have allowed her lab to address questions of how failure occurs, how non-trivial patterns arise, and what controls the transitions between different types of flows or material properties. When not working with her students on experiments in the lab, Prof. Daniels likes to spend time in the outdoors, which leads her to contemplate on the implications of her research for geological and ecological systems. In her work, she has often idealized systems to provide insights into industrial and natural processes of interest to engineers and earth scientists.

In her Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, Prof. Daniels is collaborating with scientists and engineers – both at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and beyond – on the mechanics of granular materials, a class of materials such as soils, agricultural grains, and pharmaceutical powders which exhibit both solid-like and liquid-like behaviors. Her aims are to investigate the regime near the transition in those behaviors; develop new experiments which quantify the mechanisms through which the inclusion of rigid fibers modifies the material’s strength; and make flow predictions through both statistical and continuum models. In teaching IISc students, she is developing open-source teaching materials with a focus on experimental methods.

Nitya (Deepa) Das Acevedo

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Everyday Constitutionalism: Searching for Constitutional Morality in Contemporary India
Field of Study:	Law
Home Institution:	Emory University, Atlanta, GA
Host Institution:	National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	December 2023
Duration of Grant:	Five and a half months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Deepa Acevedo is a legal anthropologist and a law and society scholar. Her research blends ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological theory with doctrinal and policy analysis to provide new insights into legal rules and institutions. Dr. Acevedo is an associate professor of law at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her JD and PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago and her BA in politics from Princeton. Her monograph, The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2023. Her articles have been published or are forthcoming in, among others, Law & Social Inquiry, Duke Law Journal, the American Journal of Comparative Law, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the Asian Journal of Law and Society, and Modern Asian Studies. She has also guest-edited several special collections: a pair of issues in Alabama Law Review and Law & Social Inquiry focusing on interdisciplinary engagements between law and anthropology; a virtual issue in Law & Society Review on legal anthropology (with Anna Offit); and a collection on “constitutional ethnography” appearing via ICONnect – the blog of the International Journal of Constitutional Law.

Constitutions are documents for everyday life. Despite this, the study of constitutional law remains largely cabined to rarified contexts, elite actors, and written materials. Dr. Acevedo’s Fulbright-Nehru project is connecting the theoretically weighty field of constitutional law with the nuanced empirical insights afforded by anthropology to show how a diverse collection of Indian actors define, refine, and mobilize their national charter. In particular, Dr. Acevedo’s project is using the recently popular concept of “constitutional morality” to explore how ordinary citizens engage with and mobilize their Constitution.

Nandini Deo

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Civil Society and Corporate Collaboration
Field of Study:	Political Science
Home Institution:	Bethlehem, Bethlehem, PA
Host Institution:	S.N.D.T. Women’s University, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Nandini Deo is an associate professor of political science at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. She is the author of Mobilizing Religion and Gender in India, the co-author (along with Duncan McDuie Ra) of The Politics of Collective Advocacy in India: Tools and Traps, and has edited a volume called Postsecular Feminisms: Gender and Religion in Transnational Perspective. Currently, she is finishing work on a monograph on civil society and corporate collaboration in India. In 2022, Dr. Deo was awarded Lehigh’s highest teaching award. She is also an advocate of student collaboration in curriculum development and her latest interest is in unconventional educational experiments – unschooling and self-directed education.

In Mumbai, as part of her Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Deo is sharing findings from her research on the aftermath of the 2013 revisions to the Indian Companies Act which created a new arena of corporate social responsibility. These revisions require large corporations to donate at least 2 per cent of their annual profits to social causes and strongly encourage them to partner with NGOs. The result has been a huge influx of corporate funding and influence in the social inclusion and sustainable development spheres. Through her project, based on insights from business leaders, NGO activists, and the new intermediaries who connect them, Dr. Deo is showing that this influence is not reciprocal – that is, corporate social responsibility seems to change NGOs more than it changes the businesses involved in it. Besides, as an award-winning teacher, she is also sharing exciting pedagogical approaches with colleagues who want to explore “ungrading” and “student-centered” and “active learning” curriculum designs. She is expecting that her work will build connections with the faculty in India wherein an annual U.S.–India course can be created and co-taught which will benefit the students of both her home and host universities.

Jessica Gladden

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	A Qualitative Comparative Study of the Use of Yoga as an Intervention in India and the USA
Field of Study:	Social Work
Home Institution:	Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI
Host Institution:	Christ University, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	November 2023
Duration of Grant:	Five months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Jessica Gladden has a PhD in social work from Michigan State University and an MSW from Grand Valley State University. She has had a variety of clinical experiences in private practice with the Fountain Hill Center for Counseling and Consultation in Michigan. She has also taught trauma-informed yoga at Grand Rapids Healing Yoga and has worked as a therapist at the YWCA and several other agencies. Besides, she is the founder and executive director of Thrive: A Refugee Support Program.

Dr. Gladden has multiple publications and presentations to her credit on topics such coping strategies related to refugees; somatic interventions in the form of yoga-based therapy; and teaching trauma content in higher education. She is certified in trauma-sensitive yoga and as a clinical trauma professional.

In her Fulbright fellowship at Christ University in Bengaluru, Dr. Gladden is dividing her time between research and teaching. She is participating in qualitative research that seeks to gain understanding on how yoga is being used as a therapeutic intervention in India and comparing this to what takes place in the United States. She is also teaching one course through the Department of Sociology and Social Work. In addition, Dr. Gladden is working with at least one of the university’s projects through the Centre for Social Action.

Ram Mohan

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Better Living through the Practice of Green Chemistry
Field of Study:	Chemistry
Home Institution:	Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, IL
Host Institution:	Saint Joseph’s University, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	December 2023
Duration of Grant:	Six and a half months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Ram Mohan earned a bachelor’s (honors) in chemistry from Hansraj College in Delhi; a master’s in organic chemistry from the University of Delhi; and a doctorate in organic chemistry from the University of Maryland, Baltimore. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and started his career at Illinois Wesleyan University (IWU) in 1996 where he is currently the Wendell and Loretta Hess Professor of Chemistry. Professor Mohan has taught a variety of courses at IWU ranging from nursing chemistry to organic chemistry, advanced organic chemistry, and a physical science course titled “Better Living through Green Chemistry”. Due to his efforts, there has been a significant reduction in the waste generated in the chemistry labs at IWU and also in the use of toxic chemicals; he has also been responsible for the greening of the labs. His research focuses on green organic synthesis using bismuth compounds. His contributions in this field have led to a surge in popularity of bismuth compounds worldwide.

Prof. Mohan has published 66 manuscripts, the majority co-authored by IWU students, and many highly cited. He has also facilitated the receipt of over USD 1 million in external funding. Besides, he has given over 130 talks in 16 countries. He is also the recipient of several awards, including: the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry Young Observer Award; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County 2002 Distinguished Alumni Award; the Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award; the Pfizer Pharmaceuticals Green Chemistry Award; the Chemist of the Year 2011 title; the Fulbright Teacher Scholar Award 2012; and the American Chemical Society’s Committee on Environmental Improvement Award for Incorporating Sustainability into Chemistry Education.

Prof. Mohan’s Fulbright-Nehru project is pursuing both teaching and research in India. At St. Joseph’s University in Bangalore, he is teaching a course on green chemistry, while in the research component, he is collaborating with Professor Chelvam Venkatesh at the Indian Institute of Technology Indore. The goal of the research is to develop environmentally friendly synthesis of molecules for HIV diagnosis. In addition, a lecture series titled “Better Living through the Practice of Green Chemistry” is being offered in many colleges and universities across India, especially in the rural areas.

Sulapha Peethamparan

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Low Carbon Concrete through One-Part Geopolymer Technology Using Locally Available Industrial Wastes in India
Field of Study:	Engineering
Home Institution:	Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	July 2023
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Sulapha Peethamparan is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Clarkson University, New York. She received her PhD from Purdue University, MEng from the National University of Singapore, MS from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and BTech from Mahatma Gandhi University, all in civil engineering. Prior to joining Clarkson University, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University. Dr. Peethamparan has over 15 years of research and teaching experience in cement, aggregate, and concrete materials. Her recent work involves various aspects of the development of alternative or low carbon concrete such as high-volume fly ash concrete, bio-cement concrete, alkali-activated or geopolymers concrete. The primary objectives of these studies are to determine the fresh, hardened, and durability performances of such low carbon concrete and their underlying physiochemical mechanisms. Her expertise also includes CO2/NOx sequestration technologies in concrete. Dr. Peethamparan’s research work has been supported by various agencies that include the National Science Foundation, the Federal Highway Administration, New York State Energy Research and Department Authority, and New York State Pollution Prevention Institute. She has authored/co-authored over 100 technical papers and reports. Dr. Peethamparan is also an associate editor of the ASCE Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering, chair of the Concrete Research Counsel at the American Concrete Institute, and fellow of the American Concrete Institute. She is a recipient of the 2010 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development award.

The environmental impact of CO2 emission from portland cement production and the role of the concrete industry in global warming sparked the need to develop more sustainable, alternative low carbon concrete for construction. India, the second-largest cement producer in the world, reported an emission of over 250 million metric tons of CO2 in the year 2020. The main objective of this Fulbright research is to explore the viability of producing low carbon portland cement-free geopolymer concrete using locally available industrial byproducts in India and solid alkali activators through the one-part alkali activation technology. In her project, Dr. Peethamparan is also developing new course material covering several alternative cement technologies.

Shalini Puri

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Comparative Postcolonial Studies: India and the Caribbean
Field of Study:	Literature
Home Institution:	Boston University, Pittsburgh, PA
Host Institution:	Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana
Grant Start Month:	September 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Shalini Puri has a PhD from Cornell University and is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests span postcolonial, Caribbean, gender, and memory studies; indentureship, slavery, and incarceration; environmental humanities; and social movements. She is especially interested in interdisciplinary and fieldwork-based humanities methods that explore the intersection of the arts, everyday life, and social justice.

Prof. Puri co-founded the Pitt Prison Education Project. She is the author of The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory and the award-winning The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. She has co-edited Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South and several other books. She also edits Palgrave Macmillan’s New Caribbean Studies series. Currently, she is working on a book titled “Poetics for Freshwater Justice”.

As part of her Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Puri is collaborating with scholars at Ashoka University to explore how a comparative study of the Caribbean and India can reframe postcolonial studies and build enduring mechanisms for south–south exchange. The specific foci of the collaboration is research, teaching, advising, and capacity building to facilitate a cross-regional study of migration, environmentalisms, and water justice using the lens of literature and interdisciplinary humanities.

Dharmendra Saraswat

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Spatial Data Science and Artificial Intelligence for Indian Agriculture
Field of Study:	Engineering
Home Institution:	Purdue University Main Campus, West Lafayette, IN
Host Institution:	Indian Agricultural Research Institute, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	November 2023
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Dharmendra Saraswat is an associate professor in the Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE) Department at Purdue University. He received a bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering from Sam Higginbottom Institute of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences (SHUATS); a master’s degree in agricultural engineering from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi, and a PhD in food, agricultural, and biological engineering from The Ohio State University.

Before coming to Purdue, Dr. Saraswat was a faculty member at the University of Arkansas, a scientist at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, New Delhi, and an assistant professor at Chandra Shekhar Azad University of Agriculture & Technology, Kanpur.

Dr. Saraswat conducts research in information technology for agriculture. He has been pursuing two areas of emphasis within agriculture: watershed modeling; and digital agriculture. He applies engineering and science principles to measure, model, and develop digital solutions. Dr. Saraswat’s research demonstrates the application of GIS, remote sensing, and open-source software for creating new technologies, decision-support tools, and data sets to manage the environment and agricultural production systems.

Dr. Saraswat’s overall research and extension efforts have been recognized on a sustained basis. He has received several awards, including the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award (2023), Excellence in Multistate Research Team Award from USDA-NIFA for the S1069 project (2022), Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award from Purdue ABE (2022), Outstanding Educator Award by SHUATS (2021), the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers’ (ASABE) ITSC Best Paper Award (2019), ASABE Standards Award (2018), ASABE Educational Aids Blue Ribbon Award (2017, 2015, and 2013), the American Society of Horticultural Sciences’ Outstanding App Award (2016), Southern Region-American Society of Horticultural Sciences’ Blue Ribbon Extension Communication Award (2016 and 2012), the Fellow of Indian Society of Agricultural Engineers (2014), John W. White Outstanding Extension State Faculty Award by the University of Arkansas (2014), and Excellence in Remote Sensing and Precision Agriculture Award from the National Association of County Agricultural Agents (2013).

Dr. Saraswat’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is focusing on applying deep learning methods to identify and study the spread pattern of bacterial blight in rice and develop a conceptual modeling framework for creating an early warning system. Besides, Dr. Saraswat is collaborating with colleagues at IARI to share experiences with curriculum design and classroom delivery for spatial data science courses to augment the existing curriculum for developing students’ analytical, problem-solving, computational, and decision-making skills and abilities.

William Westerman

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Teaching Folkloristics in the North-East of India
Field of Study:	Anthropology
Home Institution:	New Jersey City University, Jersey City, NJ
Host Institution:	North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, Meghalaya
Grant Start Month:	March 2024
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Dr. William Westerman is a folklorist, applied anthropologist, and former museum director with interests in refugees, human rights, social justice, and indigenous and immigrant communities. He has an AB from Harvard University and an AM and PhD in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at New Jersey City University, where he is also the coordinator of a program in ethnic and immigration studies. Previously, he was a lecturer in Princeton University’s writing program; he has also taught in a master’s program in cultural sustainability at Goucher College and the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York. Besides, he is a faculty member in the New Jersey Scholars Program for exceptional high school students. He has served as the director of the National Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial in Chicago and at the Drake House Museum of Plainfield. Other experiences include research and curating at the Philadelphia Folklore Project and the National Museum of American Jewish History.

Dr. Westerman’s teaching and research interests encompass immigration, with a special focus on refugee rights and the role of arts and culture in immigrant and refugee communities; ethnographic museums of immigration; indigenous rights and language sustainability; folklore and the sociology of culture; applied anthropology and social justice; and visual sociology. He is also the editor of Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. His publications include articles on applied folklore, pedagogy, museum studies, and Cambodian-American arts and culture. He is the co-author of The Giant Never Wins: Lakhon Bassac (Cambodian Folk Opera) in Philadelphia (Philadelphia Folklore Project, 1994). He has also curated numerous exhibitions, most notably “Fly to Freedom: The Paper Art of the Golden Venture Refugees” at the Museum of Chinese in America, in New York, as well as on its national tour.

In his Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, Dr. Westerman is affiliated with the Department of Cultural and Creative Studies at North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong, Meghalaya. As a part of his project, he is delivering lectures on folklore and the sociology of culture and on the practical application of folkloristics in social work. Besides, he is mentoring folklore students in their master’s and doctoral programs. He is also undertaking collaborative ethnographic research with native scholars, particularly in the areas of indigenous museums, oral literatures, folklore curriculum, and language preservation.

Julia Wintner

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching & Research)
Project Title:	Responsible Curating: Contemporary Approaches, 2023–2024
Field of Study:	Arts
Home Institution:	Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimanti, CT
Host Institution:	Design and Technology, Bengaluru, Bengaluru
Grant Start Month:	January 2024
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Ms. Julia Wintner is the director of the Art Gallery at Eastern Connecticut State University (ECSU) in Willimantic, Connecticut, where she curates exhibitions, manages the visiting artist program, and teaches courses in curatorial practice. Previously, she was the director of the University of Central Florida Art Gallery, Orlando, where she developed a solid record of multidisciplinary curating and promoted the fine arts as a central and highly visible part of academic and cocurricular campus life. She graduated from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York. Her academic studies are supported by a two decades-long immigrant journey through four continents, beginning in Russia, continuing through South East Asia and the South Pacific, and concluding in North America. Her immigrant journey inspired her interest in diasporic art making. In her curatorial work, Ms. Wintner highlights the artist’s role as a cultural ambassador of the divided contemporary world; she also focuses on the development of a constituent-based curatorial model. Her research has been presented and featured in academic conferences and publications.

Ms. Wintner’s Fulbright-Nehru project is researching contemporary curatorial practices in India and how the curator’s role there has evolved over the past 30 years. She is instructing Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology students in their curatorial MA program regarding contemporary curatorial practices within U.S. cultural institutions. Her award will result in exhibitions showcasing contemporary Indian artists, curatorial exchanges, and joint classroom sessions between her home and host institutions. The project will also contribute to creating a cohort of curators who will be intermediaries between countries, cultural policies, and diverse audiences.

Audra Anjum

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching)
Project Title:	Novel Approaches to Faculty Development and Student Engagement in Higher Education
Field of Study:	Education
Home Institution:	Ohio University, Athens, OH
Host Institution:	JSS Academy of Higher Education & Research, Mysuru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	February 2024
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Audra Anjum is an instructional designer at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. She earned a PhD in instructional technology and an MA in applied linguistics, both from Ohio University, and a BA in English from Wilmington College, Ohio. Dr. Anjum’s teaching experience includes teaching undergraduate courses at Ohio University and at institutions abroad. She has taught in many different teaching modalities across different types of learners. Over the past decade of her professional practice, Dr. Anjum’s work as an instructional designer has mainly centered around faculty development and course design. She has delivered several faculty development workshops both in the United States and India, as well as collaborated with over one 100 faculty members and subject-matter experts on all or parts of hundreds of courses, seminars, and other transformative learning experiences.

Dr. Anjum’s primary research focus is on investigating the individual differences and factors that influence instructors’ decisions to use technology in university settings, wherein the integration of enterprise-wide solutions is implicitly mandatory. The impetus to pursue this line of research mainly stems from her efforts to reframe current approaches to faculty support initiatives with greater empathy, by leveraging differences among instructors’ varying coping responses to workplace stressors (like the use of technology) rather than through instructional best practices and institutional mandates. She is also involved in capacity-building efforts for promoting teacher training at Ohio University wherein she frequently collaborates with both pre- and in-service instructors across a wide range of disciplines who are interested in contributing to the scholarship of teaching and learning within their areas of expertise.

Dr. Anjum’s Fulbright-Nehru project is facilitating a capacity-building program for instructional design and faculty development at the JSS Medical College in Mysuru, India. She is carrying this out in collaboration with the faculty and administration. She is also teaching classes and opening up a series of professional development opportunities to enhance teaching practices and student engagement, with specific focus on topics such as technology use, accessibility and inclusivity, active learning strategies, and multimedia development.

Devan Barker

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching)
Project Title:	Instructional Development Faculty Projects and Undergraduate Teaching
Field of Study:	Education
Home Institution:	Brigham Young University-Idaho, Rexburg, ID
Host Institution:	Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Five months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Devan Barker is currently a professor of history at Brigham Young University (BYU)-Idaho where he teaches courses in world history and philosophy. Dr. Barker received a bachelor’s in Italian and a master’s in organizational behavior from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. His PhD was from the University of Wuerzburg in Germany where he studied intellectual history with an emphasis on the history of educational philosophy. Before pursuing his doctoral work, Dr. Barker was involved in starting and administering several private and charter schools, including a high school completion program in Mexico, a performing and fine arts school in Utah, Utah’s first charter school placed in a multimillion-dollar performing arts facility, and the national flagship school in the United States for Montessori education at the adolescent level. He has also worked in the corporate world for companies like Novell and PepsiCo.

Dr. Barker is a founding director of the Office of Instructional Development at BYU-Idaho where he oversaw faculty development and training programs for a decade while the school transitioned from a two-year college to a four-year university and tripled in size, adding over 700 new faculty. He continues his involvement in university pedagogy as a faculty fellow for the development office.

Over the course of his career, Dr. Barker has taught middle school, high school, undergraduate, and master’s students, has mentored several doctoral candidates, and has consulted with numerous other universities. He has presented workshops on a wide array of topics relevant to faculty development and has published articles and chapters on intellectual history as well as on university pedagogy.

The Fulbright-Nehru project involves partnering with an expert in the literature around university pedagogy and organizational change with a leading Indian university promoting educational reform. The goal is to support a university-wide culture shift from education-for-certification to knowledge production pursued as an end in the tradition of liberal arts institutions.

Arpita Joardar

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching)
Project Title:	Teaching International Management in Business Programs
Field of Study:	Business
Home Institution:	University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Dartmouth, MA
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Management-Indore, Indore, Madhya Pradesh
Grant Start Month:	February 2024
Duration of Grant:	Six months

Brief Bio:

Dr. Arpita Joardar got her PhD in international business from the University of South Carolina. Currently, she is an associate professor of management and the director of the MBA program at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She has presented her research in national as well as international conferences and received recognitions like the FIU/AIB Best Theory Paper Award and nomination for the Carolyn Dexter Award. Her research has been published in various high-quality peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of International Management, International Business Review, and International Journal of Cross Cultural Management.

Dr. Joardar’s research draws from and integrates theories from multiple disciplines such as organizational behavior, strategy, economics, psychology, and cultural anthropology to examine international business phenomena. More recently, Dr. Joardar has been engaged in researching best practices for teaching in business programs. She draws from her more than 15 years of teaching experience in bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs using multiple teaching modalities for identifying the most effective pedagogical tools for business faculty.

India’s growing demands of entrepreneurs means that it is essential to develop business programs that provide quality training on critical skills to navigate the challenges of a dynamic global business environment. Dr. Joardar is using her Fulbright-Nehru grant to work with the business academic community in India to develop curriculum that is designed for future management professionals interested in global business. In this regard, she is presenting her research and engaging in exchange of ideas with both faculty and students there. Dr. Joardar is also exploring opportunities for future collaboration in India. Besides, she is teaching management topics with international focus for courses on Cross-cultural Management and International Business. She is also helping the faculty in curriculum development and discussing research opportunities for collaboration. Similarly, she is exploring the possibility of mutually beneficial exchange programs between her home institution in the U.S. and her host in India.

John Portz

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Scholar Fellowship
Project Title:	Teaching, Advising, and Research in India
Field of Study:	Political Science
Home Institution:	Northeastern University, Boston, MA
Host Institution:	Birla Institute of Technology and Science-Pilani, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	January 2024
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Prof. John Portz is a professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. His research interests include education policy, federalism, and institutional leadership, and his teaching areas cover urban politics, intergovernmental relations, public policy, and public administration. In one major research project, he joined a team of scholars analyzing the development of civic capacity in support of public education in major U.S. cities. Based on this project, he co-authored City Schools and City Politics: Institutions and Leadership in Pittsburgh, Boston, and St. Louis (University Press of Kansas, 1999). Focusing on leadership, in another co-authored project he worked with a colleague to identify and explore six common practices of leader-managers in the public sector (Leader-Managers in the Public Sector: Managing for Results, M. E. Sharpe, 2010). More recently, he has focused on educational governance and accountability in K-12 education. Of particular interest are variations in how accountability is achieved, depending upon the institutional setting: administrative, market, professional, and political. Each setting offers a different accountability design. In addition, these designs vary across American federalism based upon different perspectives or lenses at the national, state, and local levels. This project led to a recent publication of his, Educational Accountability and American Federalism: Moving Beyond a Test-Based Approach (Routledge, 2023). In addition to his research activities, Prof. Portz has served at Northeastern University as chair of the Political Science Department and director of the University Honors Program. Outside of academia, he has served as an elected member of his home community’s school board and city council.

In his Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Portz is combining teaching, advising, and research. This includes giving guest lectures on special topics in American politics and policymaking, providing guest presentations in classes, and advising students on research projects. The political and policy dynamics of federalism in the U.S. and India is of particular interest. The research component of his project is an extension of his recent work on educational accountability, focusing on the dynamics of accountability at the elementary and secondary education levels (up to age 18) in India in comparison to the U.S.

Martha Weiss

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Scholar Fellowship
Project Title:	Behavioral Ecology and Innovative Pedagogy at Azim Premji University
Field of Study:	Biology
Home Institution:	Georgetown University, Washington, DC
Host Institution:	Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	September 2023
Duration of Grant:	Four months

Brief Bio:

Prof. Martha Weiss is a professor of biology at Georgetown University where she directs the environmental biology major and co-directs the environmental studies program. She received a BA in geological sciences from Harvard University, a PhD in botany from the University of California, Berkeley, and postdoctoral training in insect behavior from the University of Arizona, Tucson. Her research – deriving from a close observation of nature – centers around experimental exploration of questions in insect ecology and plant–animal interactions. Her topics of investigation have included floral color changes as cues for pollinators; learning and memory in butterflies; the retention of memory across metamorphosis; and the indirect ecological consequences of periodical cicada emergences. In her teaching, she prioritizes opportunities for active learning and engagement; she believes that while thoughtful pedagogy is an important foundation for instruction in any subject, it is particularly critical in STEM fields where traditional, memorization-based methods of teaching have been known to discourage participation. Outside of research and teaching, she enjoys hiking and spending time outdoors, botanizing, foraging for edible plants, and working with fibers and textiles.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Weiss is investigating the behavior, movement, and sensory ecology of ant-mimicking arthropods in areas around Bengaluru and Thiruvananthapuram. In one of the prime examples of adaptation by natural selection, a diverse array of insects and spiders exhibit a remarkable resemblance to ants, mimicking them in both morphology and behavior, and thereby gaining protection from predators that actively avoid ants. She is also offering field-based workshops to students at Azim Premji University on plant–insect interactions; besides, she is participating in pedagogical workshops on “ungrading”, a relatively new assessment strategy that moves the focus away from testing and instead puts learning at the center of higher education.

Amariyah Ayee

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru English Teaching Assistant
Project Title:	N.A.
Field of Study:	Education
Home Institution:	Duke University, Durham, NC
Host Institution:	Queen Mary’s College, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	July 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Amariyah Ayee is a recent graduate of Duke University with a master’s degree in biomedical science. While at Duke, she volunteered with seniors in the Durham community and also served on the volunteer committee. She graduated from Claflin University as a valedictorian in 2022 with a degree in biology and a minor in chemistry. At Claflin, she enjoyed tutoring students as a supplemental instructor and also volunteered at the University Writing Center and Boys and Girls Club.

Amariyah has always desired to be a physician and serve individuals in underserved communities. She has been accepted to medical school on a full tuition scholarship, which she plans to pursue following her Fulbright experience. She is excited to serve as a cultural ambassador and share her love for learning with her students.

Ren Birnholz

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru English Teaching Assistant
Project Title:	N.A.
Field of Study:	Education
Home Institution:	Northeastern University, Boston, MA
Host Institution:	Loyola College, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	July 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ren Birnholz (they/them/theirs) is an honors graduate of Northeastern University where they majored in cultural anthropology and theatre and minored in women, gender, and sexuality studies. During Ren’s time at Northeastern, they worked as a research assistant in two creative practice research labs focused on the intersections of performing arts, education, identity, and social justice. Ren’s fascination with this field led them to complete an ethnographic thesis entitled “Creating Community through Interrupted Dialogue on TransTok”, which explored how young content creators use social media to build community. They also explored how creative content is utilized to educate individuals outside of a community.

In addition to their academics, Ren spent their time as a campus leader and student advocate. Most notably, Ren led initiatives that expanded access to mental healthcare and reproductive healthcare for the entire student body. They also worked as a resident assistant for three years, mentoring first-year students as they entered the university landscape.

Ren discovered their passion for teaching at a young age. In secondary school, they worked as a theatre and dance camp counselor and as a religious schoolteacher at their local synagogue. As an undergraduate student, they completed two six-month internships: the first as a full-time elementary music teacher; and the second as the sexual misconduct and bias case manager for Boston Public Schools. Outside of a formal educational setting, Ren designs curriculum and leads workshops for reproductive justice and LGBTQ+ organizations.

After studying at Ashoka University in Sonipat, Haryana, in the summer of 2022, Ren is excited to be returning to India as an English teaching assistant through the Fulbright-Nehru grant. While Ren has explored the American education system in depth, through this program they will further their capability as an educator tied to experiences of cultural exchange.

Colleen Choate

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru English Teaching Assistant
Project Title:	N.A.
Field of Study:	Education
Home Institution:	Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA
Host Institution:	Dr. MGR-Janaki College of Arts and Science for Women, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	July 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Colleen Choate graduated from Appalachian State University in 2017 with a bachelor’s in dance studies and a minor in Spanish. Deeply connected to the creative and expressive art communities on campus, she has performed in the fall and spring Appalachian Dance Ensemble for multiple years, organized and performed in public poetry readings, held concerts for her own choreographies, and served on The Peel Literature & Arts Review poetry committee. The focus of her scholarly work and thesis was the connection between language and the body as a somatic and expressive experience. As a choreographer and as a yoga instructor, she has realized that her greatest strength lies in facilitating experiences and in holding space for others to express themselves.

Colleen was introduced to Indian philosophy in a yoga class during her freshman year in college, and she has never looked back. She began reading such texts as the Bhagavad Gita and Devi Mahatmya. Her desire for deeper connection and authentic relationship with these teachings led her to India in 2019, where she toured its southern part, visiting temples, exploring places, and of course, eating amazing food.

In 2020, she decided to switch career paths and took a TEFL course to receive her teaching certification and began working with the English Language Program students at Virginia Commonwealth University. She quickly took to the role, especially in terms of building relationships with students, which led to her current role as the global learning coordinator in the Global Education Office at Virginia Commonwealth University.

In this role, she works daily with international students studying in the United States. This includes planning and implementing cultural events and social programs to support these students. These programs help them connect with one another, as well as with domestic students, and foster community, cultural competence, and personal growth. Colleen is excited about the opportunity that the Fulbright-Nehru grant offers to work with students every day, learn from them, and find rewarding ways to build relationships through education.

Courtney Fulcher

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru English Teaching Assistant
Project Title:	N.A.
Field of Study:	Education
Home Institution:	Columbia University, New York, NY
Host Institution:	Pondicherry University, Puducherry, Puducherry
Grant Start Month:	July 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Courtney Fulcher graduated from Columbia College of Columbia University in the City of New York in 2021 where she majored in comparative literature. She worked as a classroom and administrative assistant at The Red Balloon Early Learning Center, a community preschool in West Harlem. She previously studied abroad, in India, through the NSLI-Y Hindi Academic Year Program 2016–2017 and in the fall of 2019 through the University of Wisconsin where she conducted an independent research project on alternative early childhood education in Varanasi. While in Varanasi, she studied traditional Banarasi pit-loom weaving under Salim Sahib, a weaver in Sonarpura, a weaving center in the city. Courtney is also an on-air host at WKCR-FM, a non-commercial radio station in New York City. Among other shows, she regularly programs for Raag aur Taal, a weekly showcase of classical Hindustani music.

Prior to Fulbright, she worked at a publicity agency as an audio business coordinator, working with companies in both the entertainment and audio industries.

Sumaita Hasan

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru English Teaching Assistant
Project Title:	N.A.
Field of Study:	Education
Home Institution:	Hunter College, New York, NY
Host Institution:	Swami Vivekananda Rural Community College, Puducherry, Puducherry
Grant Start Month:	July 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Sumaita Hasan graduated summa cum laude as a valedictorian with honors from Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, receiving a bachelor’s degree in media studies, English literature, and music. Her degree was supported by a four-year merit scholarship. Sumaita has had extensive experience in journalism, having served as editor-in-chief of the City University of New York’s platform, CUNYverse, in addition to being an editor for various publications.

Sumaita has also served as a volunteer vocal teacher for three years, as a volunteer English teacher for French and Bangladeshi women, and as a volunteer English mentor for a Ukrainian student. Her experience as a tutor for grade school, undergraduate, graduate, and for other professional students has reinforced her passion for teaching and writing. Sumaita is particularly interested in media literacy and cinema, and has dabbled in production, post-production, and website design. She strives to center South Asian and underrepresented voices in her work as a Bangladeshi second-generation American.

While in India, Sumaita hopes to create a journalism club that would produce a student-led publication, in addition to discussing the impact of all forms of media. She is also a trained vocalist and would love to organize a cappella group.

Paul Ward

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru English Teaching Assistant
Project Title:	N.A.
Field of Study:	Education
Home Institution:	Columbia University, New York, NY
Host Institution:	Ramakrishna Mission Polytechnic College, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	July 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Paul Ward is a recent graduate of Columbia University in New York City, with a bachelor’s degree in American history. Paul’s undergraduate studies focused on 18th-century revolutionary America, with an emphasis on constitutional law and nation building. He has also been studying Italian for the past two years and hopes to continue learning it during and after his Fulbright grant.

Paul began his teaching career with the New York City Urban Debate League in 2019 and has been interested in education ever since. As both a teacher and administrator, Paul helped the largest debate league in New York put on weekly tournaments that involved thousands of students from across the city. A debater since high school, Paul enjoys discussing world news and trends, and tries to implement these exercises into his lessons whenever he can.

In the area of education access, Paul participated as a teaching fellow with the nonprofit, Breakthrough Collaborative. At Breakthrough, he managed his own daily classroom and created a unique social studies curriculum for his class of middle school students in the Boston public school system. Paul’s curriculum challenged students to reflect on the American Dream and their role as citizens, and he is excited to personally reflect on these topics from a different perspective while abroad.

Outside of the classroom, Paul is interested in music and sports. He has played bass in jazz and rock bands for more than 10 years and is eager to bring this expertise abroad to teach others about the role of music in American culture. He is also an avid runner and completed his first half-marathon this April. In India, he looks forward to staying up late to watch his favorite baseball team, the New York Yankees, play live back home.

Paul’s grant period in India will be the first time he has ever lived abroad, and he cannot wait to meet lots of interesting people and to see the world from a new perspective.

Annika Agarwal

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Exploring Menstrual Disposal in Mumbai’s Slums through Co-created Participatory Films
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	Boston University, Pittsburgh, PA
Host Institution:	Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Annika Agarwal graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a major in anthropology in May 2023. While in school, she was the campus chairperson of Global Brigades where she organized menstrual products for communities in Honduras. She also founded Screen to Street, an organization that conducts home visits and educational programs for Latina women in their prenatal and postpartum periods. Besides, she worked as a birth doula at Magee-Womens Hospital, Pittsburgh, where she helped countless mothers during their birthing experience. One of her most valuable undergraduate experiences was developing her research skills and repertoire through Dr. Sara Baumann’s lab in Pittsburgh. During that time, she spent a summer in Mumbai, working with orphan girls to understand institutionalized menstrual practices, attitudes, and knowledge production. She has also worked on projects related to Collaborative Filmmaking, a participatory arts-based method, to understand the postpartum experiences of women in Pittsburgh. Annika will build on these experiences and skills through her Fulbright year. Ultimately, she hopes to attend medical school and continue her work on women’s health research globally.

Due to insufficient sanitary services, slum women in Dharavi, Mumbai, face a predicament. While they use dilapidated community toilets that make menstruation a communal issue, taboos perpetuate a clandestine culture. Of the sparse research that has been done on menstrual disposal, men and elders stand excluded. Therefore, this Fulbright study asks: “What are the attitudes, practices, and knowledge around menstrual disposal among men and women of different ages in Dharavi?” For her research, Annika is using Collaborative Filmmaking to co-create films on menstrual disposal with the residents. This study will contribute to the knowledge on differential bodily autonomy based on gender, a prominent issue in both the U.S. and India.

Medha Asthana

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Mother-and-Daughter Dearest: Gendered Expectations in Indian Domestic Spaces
Field of Study:	Anthropology
Home Institution:	Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
Host Institution:	University of Lucknow, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh
Grant Start Month:	October 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Medha Asthana (they/them/theirs) is currently pursuing a PhD in anthropology at Brandeis University where they study kinship and domestic spaces, intergenerational care, queerness, and gender in North India. Medha is an educator committed to inclusive higher education pedagogy and was recently chosen as a fellow with the MLA Institutes for Reading and Writing Pedagogy at Access-Oriented Institutions. Beyond their academic research, Medha is committed to publicly engaged work with grass-roots community organizations. They also hold a BA (honors, cum laude) in anthropology and a BA in business administration from the University of California, Irvine.

Medha’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying the role of the family and the domestic space as constitutive of queer identity and belonging, especially for queer individuals socialized as daughters. They are examining daily relations between queer daughters (which includes cisgender women, non-binary people, and transgender men) and their mothers and other female kin in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh; this involves topics of gendered expectations, narratives of care, and negotiations of power.

Anish Bagga

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Strengthening B Cell Selection Stringency to Improve the Efficacy of Influenza A Vaccines
Field of Study:	Virology
Home Institution:	Emory University, Atlanta, GA
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	October 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

As a graduate from Emory University with aspirations of entering the medical field and a passion for mathematics and computer science, Anish Bagga seeks to connect the medical world with math and machine learning. By bridging these fields, he hopes to bring a unique approach to patient care and medical research. At Emory, he was involved with the Emory International Relations Association as the head delegate of the Model UN team and also helped found Oxford’s Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Activist organization. Anish’s current research involves modeling influenza reassortment, building a computational model of the human thyroid hormone, and using machine learning to reconstruct electrocardiography profiles. His research in influenza resulted in a publication which stated that avian hosts do not stringently select against less-fit influenza A virus (IAV) strains, thus facilitating the reassortment of diverse IAVs which increases the likelihood of zoonosis. His second publication regarding influenza A reassortment ascertained that the respiratory structure within a host like swine could support increased diversity through reassortment; this he did through the construction of reassortment simulations in non-compartmentalized respiratory systems and compared its results to the data from the extensively compartmentalized swine lungs. Based on the results, it was determined that compartmentalization does not increase viral diversity; instead, it provides pockets where viruses that are less fit for swine but more fit for humans can thrive. The research helped elucidate the importance of swine in the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic.

Vaccines elicit a stronger immune response through the injection of a weakened virus which facilitates the formation of germinal centers containing a viral fragment: i.e., an antigen. In affinity maturation, B cells with B cell receptors (BCRs) that strongly bind to the antigen are selected for. These B cells secrete antibodies identical to their BCRs which bind to the viral components during infection, thus marking the virus for destruction. The more selective this process, the greater the antibody binding affinity, and thus a greater future immune response. To optimize the influenza A vaccine, a stochastic simulation of affinity maturation is also being developed during the study.

Lainie Beauchemin

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Assessing the Need and Feasibility of Rural Mental Health Clinics in India
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Lainie Beauchemin earned a BS in biological engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she researched the molecular underpinnings of schizophrenia and other neurological diseases through the Broad Institute. During her time at MIT, Lainie was co-president of a math mentorship program for underserved middle school girls in the Cambridge/Boston area, and worked in various roles for The Educational Justice Institute, including teaching Python to incarcerated women. She was also chair of the MIT Shakespeare ensemble as well as an actress, producer, and designer for multiple productions. Since her graduation, Lainie has been researching chronic lung diseases. She plans to pursue a PhD in biomedical engineering and hopes to work on expanding healthcare access globally.

Lainie’s Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on broadening neurological diagnostic care in rural India, in conjunction with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and Project Prakash. She is assessing the need and feasibility of a system of mental and neurological health clinics in rural India in order to pave the way for more accessible healthcare in these specialties. She is also working with her collaborators to enable the establishment of clinics which are local and accessible to villagers in the state of Uttar Pradesh. At these clinics, patients would receive screening for neurological illnesses, their data could be sent to providers in New Delhi, and prescription medicine could be sent back to the clinics, all at no cost to the villagers. Before such a system can be devised, there is a wealth of preliminary feasibility research to be conducted concerning the areas of need, the obstacles facing the villagers, the regulatory logistics of dispensing prescription medication and treatment, and the sourcing of medical equipment and personnel.

Lily Bello

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Queering Personal Law: Transgender Community Landownership in India
Field of Study:	Anthropology
Home Institution:	The City University of New York, New York, NY
Host Institution:	O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Lily Bello is a recent graduate from CUNY’s Brooklyn College where she received a BA in anthropology with a minor in LGBT studies. Her studies focused on qualitative ethnographic research methodologies as well as on transgender cultures and human rights law. She has research experience – funded via internships, academic programs, and research awards – studying activist movements and community landownership. Besides her academic pursuits, Lily has both personal and professional experience in transgender rights activism, including by working with the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, a firm focused on human rights law as it applies to transgender communities. Following her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Lily will be pursuing PhD programs in anthropology to study the relationship between transgender human rights law and the decolonial conceptions of gender-variant identity.

Lily’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the emerging relationship between contemporary personal law and traditional modes of communal housing among hijra and other gender-variant communities. This ethnographic study is taking place in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru in order to account for local cultural differences in the housing practices of these communities. The research is addressing the relationship between legal structures and the social organization of gender-variant communities, and thus contributing to a broader discourse on the application of human rights law to such communities within their local cultural contexts.

Caroline Bennet

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Social Entrepreneurship: Measuring the Impact of Community-owned Businesses in India
Field of Study:	Business
Home Institution:	Yale Universit, New Haven, CT
Host Institution:	Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Caroline Bennet is a scholar from Denver, Colorado. She recently graduated from Yale University with simultaneously awarded bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history. In her undergraduate degree, her focus lay on international security studies, diplomatic history, and urban history. She spent her graduate degree studying the history of the American Southwest. Caroline wrote her undergraduate thesis and her graduate dissertation on the history of Denver’s urban growth.

Caroline was a participant in Yale’s highly selective Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, which is aimed at addressing the large-scale and long-term strategic challenges of statecraft, politics, and social change. Through this program, she received a fellowship to research private-sector strategies for combating poverty, gender inequality, and environmental destruction in New Delhi.

At Yale, Caroline served as the director of Civic Education in Every Vote Counts, a student-led organization committed to making voting accessible to young people. She also worked for Gary Community Ventures, a Denver enterprise that mobilizes policy, philanthropy, and venture capital to address inequity and improve the lives of Colorado kids and families. While there, she helped design a high-dosage tutoring program to address COVID-interrupted learning among low-income students. She has also contributed articles to Refinery29 and the New Hampshire Union Leader, and has presented her research at various conferences and events.

Caroline’s favorite pastimes are running, reading, and watching terrible television with her little sisters. In the winter, she spends every moment she can shredding on the ski slopes.

Community-ownership business models designate various community stakeholders (producers, suppliers, employees, the environment) as shareholders. In theory, this model ensures that an enterprise’s missions will align with its stakeholders’ interests: cultural preservation; healthcare; livable wages; and environmental protection. However, practical applications of this model require investment in the business. Garnering the necessary buy-in is difficult, especially at large scales. Caroline’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the factors that reinforce communities’ trust in businesses which claim to represent their interests. She believes that understanding the aspects of the community-ownership model that promotes trust could reveal crucial information about how it can generate social impact.

Alexandra Blitzer

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	India’s POSH Act: Protecting Women in the Workplace and Realizing Economic Benefits
Field of Study:	Law
Home Institution:	Brown University, Providence, RI
Host Institution:	National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Alexandra Blitzer is a native of Westport, Connecticut, and a recent graduate from Brown University. She holds a BA in history and early modern world. She is passionate about gender policy, social change, legal studies, human rights, the performing arts, political journalism, and public service.

Prior to her Fulbright grant, Alexandra worked for the White House Gender Policy Council as an intern. She has also worked for Deloitte Consulting, Ernst & Young Climate Change and Sustainability Services, TIME’S UP Now, and the Biden–Harris campaign. Besides, she was the editor-in-chief of the Brown Political Review. She has significant experience living abroad, having spent time in Israel and Italy.

Alexandra has written extensively for the Brown Political Review on varied topics like reproductive rights, social justice, sustainability, and voting. She also wrote an undergraduate thesis, which was awarded honors, titled “Changing the Law, Changing a Community: Lamphere v. Brown University and The Opportunities and Limitations of Legal Remedies for Driving Social Change in the Workplace”. Her thesis was also awarded the Gaspee Chapter Daughters of the American Revolution Award. She is also a Birthright Excel Global Fellow (2021).

Outside of her work, Alexandra enjoys the performing arts, screenwriting, reading, spending time with friends and family, skiing, hiking, and crafting. Following her Fulbright-Nehru grant, she hopes to go to law school and continue her advocacy for women and girls as a policymaker in U.S. and international contexts.

Alexandra’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is bringing together the fields of labor, gender, law, and policy. Her research is focusing on the implementation and enforcement of India’s 2013 law titled “The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, or POSH Act. She is analyzing the benefits India’s economy would realize with the effective enforcement of this law. This project is significant because workplace sexual harassment is prevalent in India and the effective enforcement of the POSH Act would have major implications for the safety and well-being of women and girls, as well as for India’s economy as a whole.

Ava Boussy

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Digital Modeling of Buddhist Shrines in Ladakh
Field of Study:	Art History
Home Institution:	Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA
Host Institution:	Central Institute of Buddhist Studies, Ladakh, Leh
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ava Boussy is a recent graduate of Washington and Lee University with a double major in biology and art history. She first began working with 3D modeling through Florence As It Was, a professor’s project seeking to document the churches in Florence, Italy, as a way to present and preserve spaces. While Ava learnt technical skills through this process, she also began examining ways in which new digital technology could be used to promote accessibility in academia and the arts. She then joined Professor Melissa Kerin on a research trip to Ladakh. There, she not only workshopped digital modeling in an area vastly different from Florence but also gained a better understanding of working with local populations and how they promote and protect their cultural heritage.

Ava was a member of Washington and Lee’s women’s soccer team and enjoys hiking in the Blue Ridge and reading.

Ava’s Fulbright-Nehru project is promoting awareness and accessibility of Buddhist art, specifically Ladakhi Buddhist art, by creating digital models of Buddhist shrines and temples in Ladakh. The models are being created using a combination of photographs and laser scans to create accurate representations of the sites and works, and can be viewed on most digital devices. These will serve as references for future researchers and curious learners, especially given the fact that many sites are changing due to natural degradation and planned renovation and restorations.

Jennifer John Britto

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Sociocultural Implications on Menstruation: Narratives of Female Adolescents in Tamil Nadu
Field of Study:	Gender Studies
Home Institution:	University of Georgia, Athens, GA
Host Institution:	St. Joseph’s College, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Jennifer Britto is from Alpharetta, Georgia. She graduated from the University of Georgia with a double major in biochemistry and molecular biology, and women’s studies in the spring of 2023. Her passion for reproductive justice and women’s health led her to be a part of the Athens Reproductive Justice Collective Fellowship where she got the opportunity to work with local commissioners and do policy proposals. She is currently in the process of getting her paper, “The Significance of Researcher Positionality throughout the Research Process”, published in The Classics Journal. Courtesy her fellowship in the Public Service and Outreach Student Scholars Program, she has learnt to explore and engage with the Athens community. Due to this immersive involvement with the community, she won the Senior Leadership of Excellence Award in her women’s studies major. She hopes that the present Fulbright research project will support her in her aspiration to become a gynecologist and give her a global perspective on health inequity.

The Indian state of Tamil Nadu has vastly improved in increasing menstrual resource access to its population, which is reflected in its high ranking in the health index. However, the health of its population varies across regions, indicating that the intersectionality of factors like location, socioeconomic status, and gender creates discrepancies in access to resources like menstrual health education. For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Jennifer is conducting interviews with adolescent girls of marginalized communities in Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli and Virudhunagar districts to develop an understanding of how disproportionate access to resources and the sway of social taboos shape their perceptions of menstruation. The interviews are also being analyzed thematically.

Rhea Chandran

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Dismantling Criminality: Social Constructions Affecting Women Exiting Commercial Sex
Field of Study:	Gender Studies
Home Institution:	Haverford College, Haverford, PA
Host Institution:	Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Rhea Chandran graduated from Haverford College with a BA in history in 2023. She was born and raised in Geneva, Illinois, by immigrant parents from India. She attended Phillips Academy Andover where she discovered her passion for advocacy and humanities research. At Haverford, she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow where she was supported by the Mellon Foundation to conduct independent research and prepare for graduate studies. She also served as the co-chair of the Honor Council; as a student representative on a faculty committee on student academic standing; and as a co-organizer of the first-year orientation program. She has worked for the House Committee on Homeland Security; for the Office of Congresswoman Lauren Underwood; for BallotReady; and for the American Business Immigration Coalition.

Rhea’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying the historical and sociological impacts on women who exit commercial sex work in India. She is conducting archive-based historical analysis to trace the impacts of modern India’s laws governing prostitution. Her historical research is informing her sociological study which focuses on documenting casework and collecting interview data from these women to discern the best pathways for rehabilitation. Rhea’s research is seeking to answer integral questions related to how the history of criminalization of prostitution affects sex workers today.

Devin Creed

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Giving for Eating: Famine Relief & Nutrition Science in Bengal and North India, 1838–1943
Field of Study:	History
Home Institution:	Duke University, Durham, NC
Host Institution:	Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Devin Creed is a PhD candidate in South Asian history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He has completed field exams in modern South Asian history, global British empire, food history, and science and empire. Devin’s dissertation examines the changes in the practices and ideologies of “giving for eating” in the context of famines in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia. He works with sources in Bangla, Hindi, Urdu, and English. At Duke, Devin has been a Kenan Graduate Fellow, a Capper Fellow in intellectual history, and a fellow at the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge. He has made public presentations on: the erotica of the pickle in South Asian literature and history; traces of Portuguese cuisine in modern West Bengal; the political theory of B.R. Ambedkar; and the history of Catholic missions in Meghalaya. His research interests include metabolic and ecological histories, food and fermentation, and capitalism and imperialism.

He has previously received grants to conduct research in Philadelphia (on the Knights of Labor), London (on British famine policy), Northern Ireland (on martyrdom in the Irish Republican Army), and India (on famine relief). He received his MA in modern European history from Villanova University (Pennsylvania) and his BA in economics and English literature from Hillsdale College (Michigan).

Devin is an avid cook and food experimenter who spends a good deal of his time pickling, fermenting, baking, and cooking. He enjoys reading science fiction, watching films, backpacking, hiking, singing, and learning languages.

Devastating famines punctuated British colonial rule in India, a period that saw famines in Bengal in 1770 and 1943 which killed over 10 million people. Devin’s Fulbright-Nehru project is arguing that the Indian responses to states of endemic malnutrition and famine played a significant role in creating the postcolonial regimes of food charity – what he calls “giving for eating” – in India today. Devin’s research is being driven by the following question: how did inherited understandings and practices of gifting food change in the face of widespread famine, new ideas of Western humanitarianism, and the birth of modern nutrition science?

Brock DeMark

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Fabricating an Industrial City: Violence and Urban Design in Kanpur, India, 1870–1930
Field of Study:	History
Home Institution:	Bloomington, Bloomington, IN
Host Institution:	Birla Institute of Technology and Science-Pilani, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	January 2024
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Brock DeMark is a PhD student at Indiana University (IU), Bloomington, studying modern Indian history, British colonial/imperial history, and urban development. Before his doctoral coursework, Brock lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he completed his bachelor’s degree in history and English literature at the University of Arkansas in 2019. At IU, Brock has served as the leader of its History Department’s Graduate Student Association. He organized a national conference for history graduate students in Bloomington in 2022. Brock is also active in IU’s Dhar India Studies Program, practicing his Hindi at weekly conversation table meetings, attending Hindi and Urdu movie events, and composing poems in Hindi. Besides, Brock spent the summer of 2022 in Jaipur, India, studying Hindi under the Critical Language Scholarship Program.

Brock’s dissertation research is an urban history project that examines the “fabrication” of Kanpur, India – a global industrial hub – in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The word “fabrication” denotes both “invention” and a “process of constructing, fashioning, and manufacture”. Attentive to the ways in which Kanpur was “fabricated” in both senses of the word – how it was invented as a place that people would be interested in going to find work or investing money, as well as the processes and relationships that led to the construction of the city’s material infrastructure – Brock’s project seeks to make a unique contribution to the scholarly understandings of habitability and community-formation during the colonial period. Brock’s dissertation is drawing on written sources in English and Hindi located in the libraries and archives of Kanpur, Lucknow, Delhi, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

When he is not researching, writing, or reading about Indian history, Brock enjoys hiking, playing basketball, reading popular astronomy articles, and drinking lassi with his partner, Savannah.

Brock’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the growth and development of Kanpur from 1870 to 1930. The primary goal is to understand how uneven relationships of power between European industrialists, municipal officials, and Indian residents shaped the design of the city. A relatively small commercial mart and military depot that expanded rapidly during the first few decades of the Crown rule, Kanpur grew up alongside the colonial state itself. As such, Kanpur offers a unique insight into the discrepancies between what the colonial state claimed about its development projects versus their impact on the everyday life of Indian residents.

Baldeep Dhaliwal

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	The Urban ASHA Program: Filling in the Gaps
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	Public Health, Baltimore, MD
Host Institution:	Punjab University, Chandigarh, Punjab
Grant Start Month:	September 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Baldeep Dhaliwal is currently pursuing her PhD in international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH). She received her MSPH in health policy and management from JHSPH and her BS in cognitive science-neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego.

After receiving her MSPH, Baldeep pursued a career in healthcare consulting in Washington, D.C. As a healthcare consultant, she focused on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act at the state health exchange level. Baldeep then went on to pursue a research career at the International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC) where she focused on utilizing qualitative research skills and community-based participatory research methods to better understand vaccine acceptance, and lead vaccine advocacy efforts at the community, institution, and policy levels. Her work also dealt with understanding multi-level perceptions that impact vaccine-seeking behavior while simultaneously supporting policy change to improve vaccine coverage.

Baldeep has nine peer-reviewed articles to her credit and has written several academic commentaries and op-eds for journals and health blogs. As a doctoral researcher, she is focusing extensively on vaccine advocacy; she is also interested in understanding health delivery in marginalized urban populations – how urban populations access care and the role that frontline health workers in low- and middle-income countries play or do not play in delivering primary care.

The Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) program was established in India in 2005 to connect rural populations to health services. To further strengthen health delivery, the ASHA program was implemented in urban communities in 2014. The urban ASHA program’s impacts on communities are unclear, as there is a significant literature gap. Baldeep’s Fulbright-Nehru project is using qualitative research methods to facilitate a rich understanding of urban ASHA workers. She feels that as India is presently strengthening its health delivery in urban areas, particularly through the development of comprehensive urban primary health centers, it is essential to have a better grasp on the urban ASHA program.

Akshali Gandhi

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Designing Safe Streets for Children in Indian Cities
Field of Study:	Urban Planning
Home Institution:	At-Large, Seattle, WA
Host Institution:	COEP Technological University, Pune, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Akshali Gandhi is a senior transportation planner for King County Metro in Seattle, Washington. In this capacity, she has worked on bus-stop improvements, capital planning, parking policy, mobility hubs, and bicycle/pedestrian paths across the Puget Sound region. Earlier, Akshali was a consultant for Nelson\Nygaard’s Washington, D.C. office and a transportation planner for the City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In total, she has seven years of professional work experience in the transportation planning field.

Akshali holds a bachelor’s degree in community and regional planning from Iowa State University and a master’s degree in city and regional planning from Cornell University. She is Indian American and has published research on economic development challenges along commercial corridors in immigrant neighborhoods, with a focus on Devon Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. Akshali is passionate about pedestrian safety, street design, and urban mobility for vulnerable users.

Traffic fatalities are a leading cause of death among young people in India. As a transportation professional, Gandhi is interested in researching the role street design and public space interventions play in road safety for infants, children, and caregivers. A new program in Pune retrofits urban streets into pedestrian zones for children to walk, bike, and play. For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Akshali is conducting a public life study of selected road safety projects to monitor how children and caregivers use such street interventions. Working with the Institute for Transportation Development and Policy India (ITDP India), she is compiling her findings into a case study and toolkit of best practices to share with planners and policymakers.

Anmol Ghavri

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Agrarian Community and Capital in Modern Punjab 1870-1970
Field of Study:	History
Home Institution:	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Host Institution:	Birla Institute of Technology and Science-Pilani, Madurai, , Delhi
Grant Start Month:	February 2024
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Anmol Ghavri is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a 2023-2024 US Fulbright-Nehru Scholar affiliated with the Centre for Historical Studies at JNU. He focuses on the history of modern South Asia as well as global histories of capitalism, political economy, and economic life. He is especially interested in the history of India’s modern market economy and society. At Michigan he has been an instructor in courses covering all periods of South Asian history. His Fulbright and doctoral research is on the history of vernacular capitalism and enterprise of agrarian communities in north India adapting to the uneven economic transformations of the twentieth century. It seeks to pluralize our understanding of the lineage of capitalism and the institutions, contradictions, and contestations characteristic of modern India’s economy. He received his BA in History from Dartmouth College with High Honors in 2018 and master’s degrees from Columbia University and the London School of Economics in 2020.

Mary Girard

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Cultural Adaptation and Storytelling: The Formation of Adivasi Literature
Field of Study:	Literature
Home Institution:	University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
Host Institution:	Birla Institute of Technology and Science-Pilani, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Between 2013 and 2022, Mary Girard visited India – where she grew up (1959–1976) – to research her family’s story in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. She wrote a biography, Among the Original Dwellers: Remembering Ferdinand Hahn (Lulu, 2019), about her great-great-grandfather who went from Germany to British India to work among the Adivasis (tribes) in the plateau jungle region of Chotanagpur; Ferdinand Hahn was a pastor, administrator, educator, ethnologist, linguist, and historian, but it was his fascination with volksgeist (the spiritual essence of a people) that inspired him to collect folktales of the Oraon tribe and write a grammar of their language.

Mary discovered that there was a keen interest among the Adivasis she met as to how she accessed her ancestral story. While she had only some family stories, she found a great deal in archived materials in Germany and around the world. Realizing that such archives do not exist for much of Adivasi history, she started a series of writing workshops to explore how to spark memories and tell everyday stories that become building blocks for historical narratives. This storytelling project was written up as “The Journey of Discovering and Preserving Heritage” in the Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies (2019).

Mary graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and continued to maintain her interest in South Asian history as an independent scholar while working in the nonprofit sector. Throughout her work history, she has relied on the power of storytelling. She has collected whatever literature she could access to research for a novel that would tell a story about the nature of the cross-cultural relationship between the Adivasis and her ancestors. Mary is an avid traveler and enjoys blogging about her travels and journey as a writer.

Esmeralda Goncalves

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Women in Punjab and Their Traditional Needlework – Phulkari
Field of Study:	Crafts
Home Institution:	At-Large, Brooklyn, NY
Host Institution:	Punjab University, Chandigarh, Punjab
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Esmeralda Goncalves is an apparel designer who studied at Rhode Island School of Design. Her studies were inspired by the conviction that fashion is a work of art and that each garment is a performance and something to look closer at. While working at Hasbro and Cashmerrette, she found her love for woman’s design driving her to focus on women’s studies. This soon led her to work at McCann Erickson. During her time there, she learnt the value of minor details, and uses that lesson in her work today. Whether it is traveling to learn at leather tanneries or learning the indigenous textile techniques of Mexico, no detail is ever too small for her to not find beauty in.

Esmeralda’s Fulbright-Nehru project is researching Phulkari, an endangered embroidery tradition found only in Punjab, India. This tradition has been passed down from mother to daughter for generations, thereby carrying with it familial stories. Esmeralda is taking a Punjabi research course to be able to communicate with the woman she is working with. At Panjab University, she is working with the curatorial staff to learn about all the extinct techniques in embroidery’s history. Following this, she is set to have a hands-on experience in the art of making Phulkari.

Eshan Gupta

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Barriers to Solar Microgrid Usage in Rural Uttar Pradesh, India
Field of Study:	International Relations
Home Institution:	Georgetown University, Washington, DC
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Technology, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Eshan Gupta is a recent graduate from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. He graduated with a BS in science, technology, and international affairs with an emphasis on energy and environmental issues. During his time at Georgetown University, he worked on clean-energy procurement for a private-sector consulting company and was also involved in various climate-related government initiatives in the legislative and executive branches. Eshan has extensive experience in international development, both on the funding and implementation sides. He is excited to begin the next chapter of his professional and academic journey with this Fulbright grant to India which he sees as a culmination of his academic and professional experiences thus far, allowing him to explore his research interests, while also expanding his knowledge about the fast-growing clean-energy field.

In his free time, Eshan enjoys singing, Bollywood dancing, and biking.

Eshan’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is working towards understanding why the current deployment of solar microgrids in rural India has not yielded the clean-energy and economic impacts that were promised. In order to study the several educational, social, and technological barriers to solar microgrid usage, Eshan is conducting interviews and policy analysis with various communities to understand how the government can better support rural deployment of solar microgrid to maximize usage; he is also examining the positive developmental and technological outcomes associated with solar power.

Ribhav Gupta

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	TB Diagnostic Strategies Using a Novel MDR Platform: A Cost-Effectiveness Modeling Study.
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
Host Institution:	All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	December 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Ribhav Gupta is a medical student (MD) at the University of Minnesota and is currently on leave from his final year due to research affiliations with Stanford, UCSF, and Yale. He received both his bachelor’s degree (with honors) in biomechanical engineering and master’s degree in infectious disease epidemiology from Stanford University. Ribhav’s areas of research bridges machine learning, public policy, and public health to model global health policy decisions for equitable infectious disease care.

His work has been funded by the Gates Foundation and the WHO. Notably, his work on modeling optimal pediatric typhoid vaccination guidelines informed new global standards and his early work characterizing Covid-19 epidemiology garnered national attention and has been cited hundreds of times. His research has yielded textbook chapters and over a dozen peer-reviewed articles published across highly regarded journals, including The Lancet.

Presently, Ribhav is focused on studying Covid-19 and other infectious diseases transmitting amongst detained migrant populations. He is also part of multiple national research teams that advises on hepatitis A vaccination guidelines. With a passion for health policy, he is in multiple state advisory bodies, including those for firearm safety and suicide prevention and for obstetrics and family planning for arriving refugees.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Ribhav served as an epidemiologist at the UN and across multiple municipal government agencies. Additionally, he advised the development of a Covid-19 model for the incarcerated populations adopted by 49 states amidst the pandemic. Beyond research, being a former Biodesign NEXT Fellow, he has an interest in med-tech innovation.

When outside the hospital, Ribhav can be found exploring outdoor trails on runs; rock climbing; venturing to new cafes; and experiencing what cities have to offer.

Ribhav’s ultimate aspiration is to pursue a career in academic medicine and global health diplomacy to promote equity and quality of care for marginalized populations.

In 2021 alone, nearly 11 million people were diagnosed with TB, with one in four of them living in India. Despite progress, difficulties in detecting drug resistance have limited the impact of interventions, with one in five of them now resistant to first-line antibiotics. As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Ribhav is computationally modeling cost-effective health policies to reduce TB transmission and resultant mortality using a novel, point-of-care multi-drug-resistance diagnostic platform developed at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. His work has direct tuberculosis policy applications within India and can inform global changes.

Farzana Hossain

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Landscape of Impermanence: Agriculture and Sediment Routes
Field of Study:	Architecture
Home Institution:	Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	March 2024
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Farzana Hossain is a graduate from Cornell University, having earned a bachelor’s degree with distinction in architecture. Her academic trajectory has encompassed extensive teaching and research experience, notably by serving as a teaching assistant and summer studio critic at Cornell University where she adeptly cultivated her leadership and communication proficiencies. She has garnered valuable professional exposure at renowned firms, including MASS Design Group, 3XN Architects, L’Observatoire international, and FZAD Architecture. Farzana’s research expertise centers on silt deposition and the intricate ramifications of colonial infrastructure in the Bay of Bengal; this demonstrates her unwavering commitment to comprehending multifaceted environmental and social issues. Her aspirations involve extending this research from the Himalayan watershed in Gangtok to the Bengal Basin within the Sundarbans National Park in India, as she endeavors to attain deeper insights into this intricate landscape.

The state of Sikkim in India became the world’s first “organic state” in 2003, having banned chemical fertilizers and pesticides to combat the water pollution and land degradation caused by the Green Revolution. While previous research has focused on government policies, Farzana’s Fulbright-Nehru study is examining the role of small-scale farmers and their indigenous knowledge in conserving soil and water resources. By integrating ecological design and landscape transformations with agricultural practices, the study is exploring how Sikkim’s transition to organic farming has impacted the cultivated landscape. The Rani Khola watershed in Gangtok serves as a case study, where farmers use indigenous knowledge to practice terracing and agroforestry for sustainable land management. Farzana is also documenting landscape changes and generating measured digital drawings and videos.

Kasey Jacob

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	A Brighter Future: The Investment of Adolescent Girls through Peer-Mentorship Programs
Field of Study:	Sociology
Home Institution:	At-Large, Clifton Park, NY
Host Institution:	St. Aloysius College, Mangaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Kasey Jacob earned her bachelor’s degree in anthropology and sociology, with minors in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies, and Asian, Middle Eastern studies from The State University of New York at Cortland, New York.

In her undergraduate career, Kasey participated in her university’s study abroad program in Mangaluru, India. During this program, Kasey took sociology and religion courses at St. Aloysius College. She also completed an internship at Prajna Counseling Centre, a non-government organization involved in supporting, educating, and housing children from various challenging backgrounds. Kasey’s responsibilities as an intern included providing after-school support for youth and gathering qualitative data for the center’s reporting purpose.

Following her return from India, Kasey earned her remaining course credits through an internship at West Hill Refugee Welcome Center in Albany, New York. In order to assist in the long-term transition needs of refugee and immigrant families from Afghanistan, Sudan, and Burma, Kasey led a number of youth programs to support the social, academic, and personal growth of adolescents.

After graduation, Kasey was hired as a program coordinator at West Hill Refugee Welcome Centre. In this full-time role, she coordinates adult English-language courses for single mothers; recruits, trains, and supervises university-level interns and volunteers; supports additional adult and youth programming; and evaluates program effectiveness.

Kasey is passionate about immigrant and refugee support services, community building, and advocating for accessible and equitable educational opportunities for migrant and displaced youth. After completion of her Fulbright-Nehru scholarship award, Kasey hopes to earn a master’s in educational policy and leadership.

Kasey’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is implementing a peer-mentorship program for female adolescents so that they make a successful and stable transition into adulthood. Her research involves a group of female college students and a female adolescent group. The goal of the research is to connect the adolescent group to local organizations as well as develop several programs that support their social, academic, and personal growth.

Rachel Jones

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Correlation of Socioeconomic Scale & Resilience in Children with Parental Cancer in India
Field of Study:	Medical Sciences
Home Institution:	Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY
Host Institution:	MOSC Medial College, Kolenchery, Kerala
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Rachel Jones graduated recently from Stony Brook University with a bachelor’s degree in biology, alongside a minor in international and South Asian studies. For the past three years, due to her interest in clinical research, she has been working in an orthopedics lab as a research assistant. Four of Rachel’s works have been published in indexed journals. She also received the URECA (Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities) Summer Fellowship in 2022 which enabled her to carry out full-time faculty-mentored research for 10 weeks. Besides, she has served as a research mentor to underclassmen pursuing guided research of their own. Rachel has also presented her findings twice at the annual spring symposium of Stony Brook University. Her interest in South Asian studies led her to establish her presence in the Mattoo Center for India Studies at Stony Brook. In addition to volunteering at the center and helping with hosting events, she served as a teaching assistant for Indian civilization and linguistic classes. She also received the Vineeth Johnsingh Memorial Scholarship in 2022 for demonstrating outstanding academic potential and promise to foster a better understanding of the Indian civilization.

Rachel’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is studying the socioeconomic impact of parental cancer on resilience in Indian children. While the socioeconomic impact of cancer diagnosis on an adult is well documented, there is little literature on the effect of parental cancer on a child’s development. With India’s rise in cancer burden and rapid increase in population, Rachel is conducting her project in the state of Kerala under the guidance of oncologist, Dr. Aju Mathew. The goal of the project is to extend the findings of this unique study and formulate social interventions to alleviate the effects of parental cancer on children.

Vincent Kelley

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Musical Pilgrimage to India: The Histories and Afterlives of the Jazz Yatra Festival
Field of Study:	Music Studies
Home Institution:	University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Host Institution:	Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	October 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Vincent Kelley is a PhD candidate in music studies at the University of Pennsylvania with interests in South Asian music, global jazz, social theory, music and religion, and the history of ethnomusicology. He received a BA in religious studies from Grinnell College in 2016 and an MMus in musicology and ethnomusicology from King’s College London in 2019. Vincent wrote his master’s thesis on the historical, aesthetic, and social relationships among the tabla, naqqara, and kathak performers in North India, which he is currently revising for publication. He has performed on drum set and tabla in jazz, Hindustani, and popular music settings in the United States and India. Vincent is also interested in Hindi, Urdu, and Persian languages and literature, and has received the American Institute of Indian Studies fellowship to study Urdu and the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship to study Persian. Vincent’s PhD research focuses on the political economy and aesthetics of jazz, Hindustani music, and Indo-jazz fusion in the late-twentieth century.

Vincent’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating jazz in post-Independence India through the lens of the Jazz Yatra music festivals held in Mumbai and Delhi from 1978 to 2003. The Jazz Yatra promoted the interaction between Indian classical music and jazz, and became the longest-running jazz festival in the world outside of the United States and Europe. For the project, Vincent is employing oral historical, ethnographic, and archival research methodologies to understand how pivotal economic, political, and cultural transitions in late-twentieth century India and the United States were influenced by and through the Jazz Yatra festival.

Markal Kelly

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Death Practices in India: Identifying the Religious, Economic, and Sociological Factors
Field of Study:	Anthropology
Home Institution:	Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA
Host Institution:	Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Markal Kelly, a Miami, Florida, native, was raised in Broward County. He is a recent graduate from Morehouse College where he studied international affairs and Portuguese. Previously, he worked for the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the Office of Economic and Regional Affairs in the Bureau of African Affairs. He recently concluded his internship with Global Ties where he contributed to the global projects proposed by the exchange alumni.

Markal is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Gilman Scholarship, the Frederick Douglass Global Fellowship, the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange Scholarship, the United States Foreign Service Two-year Internship, and the Charles B. Rangel Scholarship. Additionally, he has been named a Panda Cares Scholar, an Oprah Winfrey Scholar, and an Exchange Alumni Ambassador. Markal aspires to become a diplomat and promote international education. Following his Fulbright experience, he plans to attend Johns Hopkins University in Italy to receive his master’s in international service as a Thomas R. Pickering fellow.

Since Markal believes that “how we live” is intrinsically related to “how we die”, his Fulbright-Nehru study relates the notions of life and death. His research is examining how social systems like religion were created to answer life’s existential problems and how sacred religious rituals are to different civilizations. Markal’s research in India is set to provide a deep understanding of Hinduism, its ethical–philosophical discourses, and the economic implications of Indian death rites. He is also investigating how societal systems, such as India’s caste hierarchy, influence how and what behaviors people engage in, based on their financial and social standing. Besides, he is evaluating how globalization, changes inside India, and even global conflicts have affected traditions and practices. Through this research, he will also be concluding his narrative about one of the holiest towns in the world for Hindus, Varanasi, which is ironically regarded as a place where people come to both “live” and “die”. By the end of his research, Markal hopes to have properly identified and comprehended the narratives of death rites that are inherent to the Hindu scriptures.

Aruna Kharod

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Improvised Performance in the Senia Gharana Tradition: A Year of Advanced Sitar Study
Field of Study:	Musical Instrument Training – World Music
Home Institution:	The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
Host Institution:	Bharti Vidyapeet, Pune, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	February 2024
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Aruna Kharod is an ethnomusicology PhD candidate at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. She holds an MMus in ethnomusicology (2021) as well as a dual BA in Hindi language and literature and South Asian studies, all from UT Austin. Aruna’s doctoral dissertation examines transnational exchanges and histories of the sitar-making industry. Her research has been published in the International Journal of Traditional Arts and has been generously supported by the Smithsonian Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology, the Presser Foundation, Texas Folklife, and UT Austin’s most prestigious doctoral research award, the Donald D. Harrington Dissertation Fellowship (2022–23).

As a performing artist, Aruna is trained in Hindustani music and bharatanatyam dance. She studied sitar under the guidance of Professor Emeritus Stephen Slawek, a senior disciple of the late Pandit Ravi Shankar. She is currently under the training of renowned sitarist Vidushi Sahana Banerjee. Aruna teaches and performs bharatanatyam in central Texas as part of her guru, Dr. Sreedhara Akkihebbalu’s Kaveri Natya Yoga School of Bharatanatyam. She has also studied bharatanatyam and odissi intensively in India. Besides, Aruna has performed and taught Javanese gamelan for over five years.

Aruna is an ethnographic storyteller who is passionate about intergenerational and community-based work. Her notable projects include leading a project on Partition Songs in the Indian-American diaspora (2021); being involved in a digital humanities resource program on American sitar-making (2022); and being part of a mentorship programming series for women PhD students (2023). Aruna is also a photographer and budding documentary maker who focuses on hereditary and traditional luthiers and artists in the U.S. and India, as well as on intergenerational South Asian-American life. As an arts educator, Aruna leads and develops programming for audiences in public libraries, schools, senior centers, and museums around central Texas. She has worked as an artist-in-residence (Blanton Museum of Art, 2017), public outreach and programming liaison (Humanities Texas, 2021), and as a qualitative research consultant (Jugal’s Literature Festival, 2023).

Aruna’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying sitar performance through individualized, immersive, traditional taalim, or training, under the tutelage of Vidushi Sahana Banerjee. She is also practicing the nuances of improvisatory techniques and musical theory as rooted in Banerjee’s distinctive interpretation of the Rampur Senia gharana.

Anagha Kikkeri

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Breaking the Glass Ceiling: A Study of Young Women and Their Future in Indian Politics
Field of Study:	Gender Studies
Home Institution:	The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
Host Institution:	Bangalore University, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	October 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Anagha Kikkeri has a passion for education, community engagement, and public service. At the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, Anagha was the first woman of Indian descent to be elected as the student body president; she graduated from UT as a Distinguished Scholar in the liberal arts honors program in May 2021.

During her undergraduate years, Anagha garnered numerous honors, fellowships, scholarships, and awards. She was recognized as the Outstanding Senior of the Class of 2021 and was also selected to be part of the Dean’s Dozen by the Office of the Dean of Students. In 2020, she received the prestigious Hyperion Award for her exceptional contributions to the university community. Anagha was inducted into Pi Sigma Alpha and also became a member of the Order of Omega.

Anagha actively engages in extracurricular and community activities. She was a member of the LBJ Women’s Campaign School. She has held positions of leadership, such as the chairwoman of the Auditing Committee for the Texas State Society and the vice president of Diversity and Inclusion for the Texas University Panhellenic Council. Notably, Anagha delivered a commencement address to an audience of over 30,000 people at UT in 2021. She also performed a personal narrative of her life experiences as a woman in the show “Amplify”.

In terms of professional experience, Anagha has made significant contributions to the political arena. She worked as a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion associate and also served as a Mobilization Program coordinator at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington, D.C. Besides, she has served as a healthcare staff assistant to Senator Dianne Feinstein, thereby connecting with upwards of two million Californians.

Anagha’s other interests include boxing, painting, the Spanish language, mehndi, South Asian history, basketball, piano, and Frida Kahlo’s art.

Anagha’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is studying what young, urban, university-attending women believe about how they can break the glass ceiling in politics. For this, she is examining the structural causes behind the “glass ceiling”, the levels of political awareness, and the pathways forward for young Indian women. In this context, she is conducting interviews with women from diverse backgrounds. The project is significant because its results can help empower young women to shatter the glass ceiling.

Shirley Kim-Ryu

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Blurring the Separations of Binary: Theyyam Rituals in Kannur
Field of Study:	Film-making
Home Institution:	California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA
Host Institution:	Kannur University, Kannur, Kerala
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Shirley Kim-Ryu is a filmmaker and poet based in Los Angeles and Seoul. By oscillating between genres and mediums, Shirley’s work generates an energy of the primordial, deeply rooted in improvisation, chaos, and arriving in land-based rituals and practices.

A recent poetry fellow of the VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation) workshop, the Juniper Institute for Young Writers, and the Disquiet Literary Program, Shirley holds an MFA in film direction (from UCLA) and an MFA in poetry (from California Institute of the Arts), and has been the recipient of the 2022 LEF Moving Image Fund, the Fritt Ord Fund, the Nordisk Kulturfond OPSTART, the Vikken Fund, the Norwegian Film Institute Award, the James Bridges Award in Film Directing, the Hollywood Foreign Press Award, and the Mary Pickford Award. Shirley’s films have been screened in international film festivals.

Shirley is a co-founder of the LA-based Solano Film Collective which creates various forms of films, including in collaborations with LA-based arts organizations like Archeffect Design, MOCA, and Clockshop.

Shirley’s Fulbright-Nehru research project involves working in kinship with the lived culture of the ritual dance theyyam in Kannur, Kerala. In the context of an intersection between Korean and Indian indigenous spirits, she is exploring artistic inquiries and getting closer to a deeper understanding of artistic roots and their identity in multiplicity. In this regard, she is seeking answers to questions such as: how does theyyam process the idea of gender in the language of nature; how does it function in the community to serve its members; and how has it digested the communal blues caused by colonialism, class, and patriarchy?

Tsering Lhamo

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Caterpillar Fungus Trade in the Eastern Indian Himalayas
Field of Study:	Geography
Home Institution:	University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO
Host Institution:	North Bengal University, Siliguri, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	October 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Tsering Lhamo is a first-generation Tibetan-American PhD student. Her research is taking place under the guidance of Dr. Emily Yeh at the Geography Department of the University of Colorado Boulder. Coming from an interdisciplinary background in international development and global health, Tsering’s research interests center on the intersections of sustainable development, political ecology, traditional medicines, and cross-border trade within the Himalayan region. As an American India Foundation (AIF) William J. Clinton Fellow from 2017–2018, Tsering worked with the Maternal and Newborn Survival Initiative (MANSI) to conduct baseline research and interventions on reproductive health among adolescents in underserved female populations in rural mountain communities in Uttarakhand, India. Trained in biomedical sciences, Tsering has worked as a laboratory associate at the Yale New Haven Hospital. She has also served as an AmeriCorps volunteer where she tutored young students from underprivileged communities in Washington, D.C. Tsering holds a master’s degree in international development from the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland, where she specialized in environmental sustainability and global health. She holds a bachelor’s degree in international studies with a minor in biology from the American University in Washington, D.C. Tsering is also a recipient of the U.S. Department of Education’s 2023 Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship for studying Nepali language.

Found in the Himalayas, the caterpillar fungus is an assemblage of organisms composed of a fungal body protruding from the head of its moth larva host. Valued within Chinese medicine and in biopharmaceuticals for its therapeutic functions, the fungus has been worth more than its weight in gold on the market. As a result, the fungus collection and trade are a source of as much as 50-90% of cash income for the Bhutia, Lepcha, Nepalese, and Tibetan people who participate in the fungus harvest and trade in the Indian Himalayas. However, not much is known about the caterpillar fungus trade in the Eastern Indian Himalayas. Tsering’s research seeks to understand the lived experiences of Himalayan communities in Siliguri region of North Bengal in the larger West Bengal state, using the caterpillar fungus trade as an analytical tool. Tsering will be working under the guidance of Dr. Swatasiddha Sarkar from the Centre for Himalayan Studies at North Bengal University in Siliguri, West Bengal. Dr. Sarkar’s expertise in the regional geography combined with his scholarship on labor and ethnicity will be paramount to my research on the caterpillar fungus trade in the region.

Sahita Manda

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Adolescence and the Autism Spectrum Disorder: Assessing the Needs of a Growing Population in India
Field of Study:	Psychology
Home Institution:	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Host Institution:	National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	October 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Sahita Manda is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health with a BS in public health sciences and a minor in biochemistry. She has had a longtime interest in working with people with disabilities, both through her research exploring stigma and neurodiversity as well as through her volunteer work. Sahita is also greatly interested in health policy and has interned at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. She hopes to pursue a career as a physician by integrating the principles of medicine and public health.

For her Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, Sahita is conducting nine months of research at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bengaluru, India. She is exploring parental perspectives and experiences related to seeking clinical and non-clinical services for adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD); she is also examining the navigation of the physical, sexual, cognitive, social, and emotional changes that come with adolescence. Sahita is also studying the lived experiences of adolescents with ASD. Using aggregated data from semi-structured interviews, she is identifying the current gaps in services and opportunities for this population, with the eventual goal of informing the development of culturally appropriate, holistic care.

Zachary Marhanka

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	A Study of Solar Pump Integrations within Agricultural Production in Pandharpur
Field of Study:	Energy
Home Institution:	University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
Host Institution:	SVERI’s College of Engineering, Pandharpur, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Zachary Marhanka graduated from the University of Virginia in May 2022 with double majors in economics and global studies on environments and sustainability, and a minor in statistics. Under the Department of Economics Distinguished Majors Program, Zachary wrote an empirical thesis analyzing the adoption of community solar systems and their financial consequences for U.S. households. He further synthesized nationwide low-income solar policies and their application to his home state of Virginia for his global studies major capstone project. As an undergraduate and as a lawyer in his university’s judiciary committee, Zachary defended students accused of conduct violations. He also assisted fellow community residents as a volunteer income tax assistant. Besides, he was an editor for the Virginia Policy Review, a university policy journal. Outside of management consulting stints, Zachary has held internships with the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, the office of Congressman Gerry Connolly, and the United States Census Bureau. After graduating, he worked as a research assistant in development economics topics, analyzing tax collection data and gender-focused surveys in South Asia. He currently works as an analyst for ICF International where he assists the U.S. Department of Energy and several state governments in identifying energy supply-chain vulnerabilities. These experiences emphasize Zachary’s goal to pursue a career in energy and environmental policymaking, specifically around topics of energy justice and the development of community-centered renewable energy systems.

In his free time, Zachary enjoys hiking, cooking, playing volleyball, and gardening.

For his Fulbright-Nehru research project, Zachary is using a mixed survey and interview design to assess solar pump deployment within the Pandharpur tehsil of Maharashtra. In partnership with SVERI and Sobus Insight Forum, his research is engaging farmers in the 103 villages surrounding Pandharpur to collect data on solar adopter demographics and financial statements. Zachary’s work will provide a case study on solar irrigation and its consequences for agricultural businesses. The project’s output will also contribute to SVERI’s understanding of renewable energy deployment among local businesses, as well as provide a path toward the refinement of rural energy policy.

Manjot Multani

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Intimate Sexual Scripts among Youth in Chandigarh, India: A Visual Ethnography
Field of Study:	Anthropology
Home Institution:	California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA
Host Institution:	Punjab University, Chandigarh, Punjab
Grant Start Month:	January 2024
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Manu Multani is a PhD candidate in anthropology and social change at the California Institute of Integral Studies in California. The institute has set its professional goals with the intention to not only emphasize the struggles of South Asian (SA) communities but also to seek, recognize, and name the solutions through which SA communities can resist. Manu has co-founded a podcast, ReThink Desi, to showcase such narratives. She is also an emerging filmmaker who focuses on visual aesthetics and storytelling for social change.

Manu has worked as a health program planner for several years for the Department of Public Health in San Francisco, engaging in local community discussions regarding public services such as hospital-based care, food insecurity, and homelessness; this has resulted in her acquiring expertise in understanding the lived realities of social determinants of health and disparities. Manu is also a two-time recipient of the Critical Language Scholarship for Panjabi in addition to the Hollywood Foreign Press Scholarship, Student Scholarship at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Education, and the Public Health Hero Award. She also has a master’s in global health and a bachelor’s in philosophy.

Manu currently lives in Los Angeles, California, with her partner and pup. During their free time, they like to read culturally diverse cookbooks to integrate new spices and techniques into their own cooking.

For her Fulbright-Nehru multimodal ethnographic study, Manu is investigating how young North Indian adults define and experience romantic, healthy relationships and how these reciprocally inform their sexual scripts. Through qualitative in-depth interviews and a participatory action research methodology – whereby the participants document short videos – she is attempting to produce a visual ethnography truer to the real experiences of the participants. Overall, this project unravels how sexual health and sexuality education become a part of what is known as “sexual literacy”, thereby contributing to the dearth of scholarship on North Indian youth sexualities.

Priyamvada Nambrath

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Archival Research and Textual Study of Indian Mathematical Manuscripts
Field of Study:	Mathematics
Home Institution:	University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), Mangaluru, Maharashtra
Grant Start Month:	December 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Priya Nambrath is a doctoral candidate in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation research focuses on the applied practice of mathematics and astronomy in the sociocultural life of medieval and pre-modern Kerala. More broadly, she is interested in the intellectual and scientific history of India with a focus on cultural encounters, archaic modernisms, patronage, and pedagogy. Language and literature, textual culture, and visual art constitute additional related areas of her focus. She is also interested in folk traditions of art and knowledge in South India, and the ocean-facing histories of the region.

Priya brings her previous training and work experience in science and mathematics to her current research interests in Indian scientific and educational history. She has taught university courses in Sanskrit and Malayalam language and literature and has published a translation of a Sanskrit play. She has also been a highly successful coach for competitive mathematics at the school level.

Under the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Priya is researching the pedagogical approaches and cultural concerns that shaped the mathematical culture of South India in the pre-colonial and early colonial periods, with a focus on the Kerala school of Indian mathematics. She is conducting archival research on untranslated mathematical materials composed both in Sanskrit and in the vernacular languages. Priya hopes that her research will contribute to increasing awareness about a plurality of scientific traditions and pedagogical strategies which can be profitably utilized in modern classrooms.

Clara Navarro

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Examining Integrative Mental Health Services in Southern India
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD
Host Institution:	National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Originally from Austin, Texas, Clara Navarro is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy. At the academy, Clara majored in Chinese and researched in the anthropology department where she published on the subject of gender relations in the military.

Upon graduation, Clara served in the United States Navy aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln where she was the deputy public affairs officer and principal assistant of the Media Department. Along with the crew, she completed a record-breaking around-the-world deployment from Norfolk, Virginia, to San Diego, California. Returning to land, she worked for two years as the media officer for the Europe, Africa, Central Navy Region headquarters in Naples, Italy. In this role, she coordinated communication between eight naval bases and seven host-nation embassies.

Honorably discharged from the Navy in 2022, Clara then earned a post-baccalaureate, pre-medical certificate at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., fulfilling the course requirements to apply to medical school. She is currently applying to medical schools across America.

Working with India’s National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Clara’s Fulbright-Nehru project is researching integrative mental healthcare services in the South Indian state of Karnataka. In a three-phase approach, her project is being executed first through archival research and clinical observation, then via interviews with practitioners and patients, and lastly, by reflection and synthesis. She is also assessing the hybrid practice of Ayurveda and allopathic mental healthcare that is growing in prevalence in India by focusing on both its successes and limitations, as well as on its impact on the community.

Catherine Nelli

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Investigating Indology: European, Sanskrit, and Bengali Reception of the Gītagovinda
Field of Study:	Literature
Home Institution:	Brown University, Providence, RI
Host Institution:	Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Catherine Nelli completed her BA with honors from Brown University in May 2023. There she studied Sanskrit classics, comparative literature, and international and public Affairs. Catherine also completed two senior honors theses, “On Nineteenth-Century Indology: Divergences between Sanskrit and Colonial French and English Reception of Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda” and “Between Empire and Post-Colonial Nation-Building: A Comparative Analysis of Nationalism’s Role in French India’s Decolonization in Chandernagore and Pondicherry (1947–1954)”. She is interested in colonial, transcultural literary reception, Sanskrit commentaries, and Bengali interactions with Sanskrit texts.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Catherine is accessing the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the Bhaktivedanta Research Center in Kolkata, the French Institute of Pondicherry, and the Records Centre archives in Puducherry. She is also working with her affiliates in the Sanskrit and comparative literature departments at Jadavpur University and the École française d’Extrême-Orient to investigate French and English colonial reception of the Gītagovinda, a classical Sanskrit love poem, in tandem and tension with intracultural Sanskrit and Bengali commentarial receptions.

Sriram Palepu

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Health Needs and Aesthetic Preferences Assessment of the Hyderabad Trans Community
Field of Study:	Medical Sciences
Home Institution:	University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Host Institution:	Jayamukhi College of Pharmacy, Warangal, Telangana
Grant Start Month:	October 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Sriram Palepu is a medical student with an interest in identifying and addressing healthcare disparities in South Asia. He completed his undergraduate studies from The University of Texas at Austin where he studied the heavy-metal contamination of the Godavari River. He is now a student of the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. He has specific interests in HIV dermatology, gender-affirming care, and environmental health, and hopes to work in India throughout his career.

Sriram is pursuing his Fulbright-Nehru research at Mitr Clinic in Hyderabad in order to understand: the social and health history of trans, or hijra, communities in Hyderabad in terms of substance use and mental health; the extent to which trans individuals are currently satisfied with their external gender presentation; and the attitudes toward the importance of and accessibility of bodily and facial aesthetic procedures in affirming gender identity.

Abhiyudh Rajput

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	The Impact of Automobile-Centric Built Environments on Pedestrian Fatalities
Field of Study:	Public Health
Home Institution:	University of Rochester, Rochester, NY
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Abhiyudh Rajput (they/them/theirs) holds a BS in environmental health and a BA in cultural anthropology from the University of Rochester. Professionally, they are experienced in clinical, qualitative, and wet-lab research, with a paper published on a potential therapy for diabetes. Studying a medical treatment led Abhiyudh toward the path of preventive health as they felt they could have a greater impact on creating conditions that prevent diseases. This realization, combined with their fields of discipline, led Abhiyudh to study urban planning as they began to realize how much of one’s health is determined by the design and layout of their city; for example, street design dictating whether one walks or drives, thus impacting exercise levels, mental health, and likelihood of injury.

Abhiyudh’s interest in India stems from their heritage as well as their exploration of cultural phenomena such as nation-building, caste, and personhood through their anthropology degree. This degree coursework culminated in a senior project that explored how Indian films create a collective narrative around the communal unrest caused by the Partition. They hope to apply this appreciation for human subjectivity and cultural forces in their personal and professional life. Beyond critically exploring their culture, Abhiyudh has engaged with India through their involvement with the community-based health organization SOVA in Odisha. During their four years as an undergraduate, they developed a strong relationship with the SOVA community and assisted with fund-raising for programs such as adolescent reproductive health education and computer literacy.

Aside from academics, Abhiyudh is interested in music, films, and photography. In their free time, they enjoy being creative, making mashups of songs, taking photographs of streetscapes and friends, and concocting recipes that blend cultures. They enjoy exploring cities, both familiar and unfamiliar, eating their way through New York City’s Chinatown or taking a solo trip to Mexico City to practice Spanish.

Abhiyudh’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying the impact of increasingly automobile-centric built environments in Delhi on the safety of pedestrians and the subjective impacts on their mobility. In this context, 50 pairs of roadways are being analyzed via a matched case-control study design, measuring quantitative and qualitative data related to pedestrian safety and comparing it to the actual historical safety of these roadways. Overall, this project seeks to understand what can make Delhi’s roadways safer for its most vulnerable users and how can future pedestrian deaths and injuries be prevented.

Rafa Sattar

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Empowering Girls in Rural West Bengal through Access to Educational Technology
Field of Study:	Political Science
Home Institution:	The City University of New York, New York, NY
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, Bengaluru, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Rafa Sattar graduated from Macaulay Honors College at CUNY Hunter College in 2020 as a salutatorian with a BA in political science. Rafa is currently pursuing her master’s in nonprofit management at Columbia University. There, she is one of the two winners of the Excellence in Academic Leadership Award for the 2022–2023 academic year. She is also a 2022 recipient of the Diana Award, one of the most prestigious accolades a young person can receive for their humanitarian work. Rafa is founder and president of Fera Foundation, an international nonprofit that delivers tailored educational services based on the needs of the most vulnerable children. In 2020, she launched the CARE (Countering Adversity via Remote Education) Teaching Fellowship at a girls’ orphanage where she aimed to help the children prepare for their exams and procure meaningful mentors; by adapting a dual teacher system, Rafa envisioned a future where online learning could overcome barriers to educational equity. Since then, Rafa has been managing a team of 70 remote teachers from seven countries and 100 weekly synchronous and asynchronous classes at more than 200 schools and orphanages. The online classes for grades 1–12 integrate curricula, interactive resources, and teaching techniques adapted from the U.S. education system. Rafa also serves on the board of trustees of the UK-based charity, Communities Against Gender-Based Violence International. After her Fulbright fellowship, she hopes to pursue a JD in the U.S. to defend the educational rights of women and children around the world.

In her free time, she enjoys early morning runs, watching classic Bengali films, and visiting art museums.

Rafa’s Fulbright-Nehru research is exploring how innovative social interventions in West Bengal apply localization strategies to promote educational equity. Under the supervision of Dr. Devi Vijay of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Rafa is attempting to determine how community-centered approaches to social innovation in India can apply to the Fera Foundation. She is also researching community-centered approaches to organizing and also the factors that catalyze acceptance for social change in India.

Lilith Saylor

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	A Future of Their Own Making: Farmers, Startups, and Digital Tech in Rural India
Field of Study:	Development Studies
Home Institution:	At-Large, Gaithersburg, MD
Host Institution:	International Institute of Information Technology, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Lilith Saylor is interested in challenging the assumption that technology and rural spaces exist in contradiction and believes that rural spaces exist as integral, active contributors to the globalized world. An at-large scholar with a background in economics and development studies, as well as family ties in Kentucky’s Appalachian region, Lilith is both excited by and critical of technology’s role in rural development. She graduated from Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2020, with majors in economics, political science, and international relations. She went on to work in startups as one of the founding team members of BioSolution Designs, and also wrote critically on biometric technology and its political and socioeconomic entanglements in her paper, “Suspicion Encoded: Women of Color and Biometric Technology in the United States”, which was published by California Polytechnic State University’s sprinkle journal. She has also spoken on the importance of building technology by considering the right to privacy, in her workshop, “Built to Protect”, at Technica Hackathon 2021 and TechTogether Atlanta 2022.

Lilith’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the factors influencing active rural digital engagement by comparing the interests, needs, and values of smallholder family farms in Karnataka to the digital technologies they consume. Bengaluru’s digital agritech startups depend on their ability (and obligation) to engage with smallholders as decision-making consumers, thereby giving researchers an unprecedented chance to reevaluate existing frameworks for encouraging rural digital participation. While exploring the mutual influences between smallholder family farms and digital technology, Lilith’s project is also highlighting the ways that rural regions are shaping their own digital future with their unique concerns, interests, and economic decisions.

Nicholas Shafer

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Exploring Indian Opinion on Efficacy of New Alliances to Achieve Foreign Policy Priorities
Field of Study:	International Relations
Home Institution:	At-Large, Menlo Park, CA
Host Institution:	Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana
Grant Start Month:	December 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Nicholas Shafer is a current Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford and the Institute of Development Studies, where he is completing graduate courses in modern Middle Eastern studies, international development, and public policy. A former desk officer covering Yemen and the Gulf with the U.S. Agency for International Development, Nicholas has spent the past five years living and working across Europe, the Middle East, and in Washington, D.C. at the intersection of international development and foreign affairs from various vantage points, including the U.S. policy community, INGOs, and a fintech startup in London. His research principally examines the dynamics of rising powers in the international system, with a regional focus on the Middle East and Indian Ocean community. Nicholas has also written on the adoption and deployment of decentralized currencies in fragile state environments such as Lebanon.

A native of Silicon Valley and a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, with a BA in anthropology, Arabic, and public policy, Nicholas plans to continue into a career in foreign policy and public service. He is also a Boren Scholar and John Gardner Fellow; besides, he co-leads the mentorship program for the Community College Global Affairs Fellowship funded by the Gates Foundation which provides community college students with the resources and networks they need to reach their full potential in foreign affairs, public service, and the world of fellowships and scholarships.

For his Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, Nicholas is exploring the spectrum of opinions amongst Indian foreign policy actors on the utility of extra-regional alliances to achieving India’s foreign policy priorities in four key areas: energy security; food security; technology ecosystems; and national security. In a more contentious and complicated geopolitical environment, he is studying current and next-gen perspectives on alliances and approaches to foreign affairs to navigate the early 21st century. His project is also focusing explicitly on the emerging mini-lateral relationships and collaborations, including the I2U2 Group and the Quad, as well as on broader thinking within the Indian strategic planning community.

Joshua Shelton

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	A Feast of Flesh and Blood: The Manly Life of Tantric Virtuoso Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé
Field of Study:	Art History
Home Institution:	Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
Host Institution:	Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh
Grant Start Month:	January 2024
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Joshua Shelton is a doctoral candidate in the Religious Studies Department at Northwestern University where he specializes in Buddhist and critical masculinities studies. His research focuses on the phenomenological textures of religious manhood in Tibetan tantra, seeking to illuminate the inflection points between masculinity as an abstract concept and manliness as an embodied enactment. His dissertation pursues these questions by attending to the life and writings of the nineteenth-century tantric virtuoso Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé, the gun-wielding, deer-hunting, beer-drinking tantric master descended from a line of “bloodthirsty bandits” in eastern Tibet.

Joshua earned his bachelor’s in religious studies and English literature at Georgetown University where his thesis on demon possession was awarded the Theta Alpha Kappa Award for excellence in undergraduate research. After college, Joshua spent two years at the Georgetown University Law Center working on his JD degree before deciding his passion for education and social service would be better served by a career in academia and activism. Joshua continued his graduate training in Buddhist studies at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder where he received the Moore Fellowship to conduct historiographic research on tantric masculinity for his master’s in Buddhist studies. At CU, he also served as the editor-in-chief for the university’s NEXT journal. He currently serves as the coordinator for the Khyentse Foundation Buddhist Studies Lecture Series at Northwestern University.

Joshua’s Fulbright-Nehru research is attending to the life, writings, and historical context of Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé. His project emphasizes the structural roles masculinity plays as both abstract ideology and embodied practice in Tibetan religious history. Ultimately, Joshua’s thesis seeks to de-essentialize masculinity by situating it within history and alongside politics, economics, and sociology. It also emphasizes the role of non-secular Indigenous cosmology in the felt textures of religious manhood.

Evan Tims

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	From the River to Tomorrow: Perceptions on Kolkata’s Water Future
Field of Study:	Anthropology
Home Institution:	Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Host Institution:	Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, West Bengal
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Evan Tims is interested in the relationship between water, climate planning, and development in South Asia. Evan first traveled to Kolkata in 2018 as a Critical Language Scholar, and again in 2019 on the same grant, which were opportunities that allowed him to develop his skills in Bangla. In 2019, he graduated from Bard College with a joint major in written arts and human rights with a focus on anthropology. He then worked for the City Government of New York for almost two years before being named a Henry J. Luce Scholar. As a Luce Scholar, Evan studied in Nepal and researched water planning in the hydropower sector with Policy Entrepreneurs Inc., a Kathmandu-based NGO. He also studied and worked with a number of other organizations, including La.Lit magazine, where he conducted a creative writing workshop on climate change. This project led him to conduct more workshops and publish several works of climate storytelling from young writers in Nepal and Bangladesh. Currently, Evan works as a program associate with Activate, a U.S. nonprofit that funds scientists working on climate-related technologies.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Evan is conducting ethnographic research on the perceptions about Kolkata’s water future among distinct communities with connections to the Hooghly River. By balancing his work between groups of urban planners and those who have other relationships with the river, he is studying the differences between professionalized, scientific, and lived experiences of Kolkata’s water. Evan is also seeking to understand the complex, layered relationships between stakeholder communities as they seek to negotiate the future of water in a rapidly developing city.

Caroline Troy

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	The Effect of Rapid Urbanization on Bat Diversity in Southern India
Field of Study:	Environmental Sciences
Home Institution:	Brown University, Providence, RI
Host Institution:	Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, Karnataka
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Caroline Troy is a recent graduate of Brown University where she earned her BSc in environmental science, with a focus on conservation science and policy. For her senior honors thesis, she researched environmental predictors of biogeographical variations in woodpecker drumming. She has interned with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s ForestGEO program, Brooklyn College’s Urban Ecology and Environment NSF REU, Morgan State University’s Patuxent Environmental & Aquatic Research Laboratory, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Brown University Herbarium.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Caroline is researching the effect of urbanization on bat diversity in South India. In this context, she is carrying out passive acoustic monitoring across undeveloped to highly urbanized bat habitat sites in and around Bengaluru. India is home to around 130 bat species. However, these remarkable mammals are threatened by habitat loss due to urbanization, logging, and agriculture. It is estimated that a quarter of the bat species in India are vulnerable or endangered. In order to create effective conservation strategies, Caroline is examining which bat species can coexist with humans in developed regions and which may be threatened without habitat preservation.

Anuka Upadhye

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Gendered Climate Change Adaptation among Goa Fishing Communities
Field of Study:	Environmental Sciences
Home Institution:	George Washington University, Washington, DC
Host Institution:	Goa University, Taleigao, Goa
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Anuka Upadhye is a recent graduate from George Washington University where she studied international affairs with a concentration in international environmental studies and a minor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Anuka’s research interests include gendered adaptation to climate change, and she has conducted research on agriculture and adaptation in Maharashtra, India. Professionally, she has worked on environmental issues at The White House, House of Representatives, and think tanks such as the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Center for American Progress.

Although Goa’s coastline is only 104 kilometers long, its fishing industry is considered one of the most economically and culturally significant entities of the country. However, recent studies have shown that climate change has already been affecting Goa, especially its fisheries sector. Additionally, it has been disproportionately impacting the marginalized communities. Specifically in Goa, women who work in the fishing industry experience exclusion and marginalization. As climate change-induced disruptions increase the institutional need for comprehensive adaptation plans and economic relief, the invisibility of women’s labor in this industry may exclude them from such adaptation strategies. Anuka’s Fulbright-Nehru research project aims to provide a more gender-disaggregated data on fisheries in Goa.

Vineeth Vaidyula

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	The Influence of Social Class on the Prevalence of Vitiligo in India
Field of Study:	Medical Sciences
Home Institution:	Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA
Host Institution:	Apollo Institute of Medical Science & Research, Hyderabad, Telangana
Grant Start Month:	September 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Vineeth Vaidyula is a graduate of the Honors College at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) where he majored in biology with a minor in chemistry. In his time at VCU, he explored his interests in public health and medically underserved populations. Passionate about refugee resettlement and immigration advocacy, Vineeth has worked with local resettlement agencies and anti-detention groups as healthcare mentor, youth tutor, public benefits assistant, and detention hotline volunteer. He has also directed the Richmond Refugee Health Partners student volunteer program, an initiative he founded to: address the unmet health advocacy needs of Richmond-based refugees; and improve the cross-cultural, person-centered-care abilities of pre-health undergraduate students at VCU. Moreover, he has served as the president of Students Together Assisting Refugees at VCU (STAR@VCU), an organization he founded which focuses on campus-wide awareness campaigns on migrant issues.

He has also been significantly involved in qualitative and quantitative research, including population-based research and wet-lab virology research. Vineeth’s long-term career goal is to be a physician-advocate, serving the culturally diverse U.S. community that raised him. After completing his Fulbright-Nehru stint, Vineeth is set to matriculate from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Vineeth’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying the Hyderabad vitiligo population using survey instruments, with a focus on investigating how social class impacts the prevalence of the condition and the quality of life of the vitiligo patients. Vineeth hopes that his research in India will help him become globally informed about the social attitudes and structural disparities associated with illness that exist within different sociocultural groups so that he can better serve the diversity of U.S. patients.

Anya Wahal

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	An Upstream Battle: The Inclusion of Indian Mothers in Water Policy and Practice
Field of Study:	Environmental Sciences
Home Institution:	Georgetown University, Washington, DC
Host Institution:	University of Delhi, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	August 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Anya Wahal is a recent graduate of Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service where she majored in science, technology, and international affairs, and concentrated in energy and the environment. She is a Taiwanese-Indian-American researcher and activist dedicated to conserving the earth’s water resources and safeguarding the marginalized communities disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis. Beyond research, Anya has interned at the State Department, Census Bureau, Library of Congress, World Wildlife Fund, and Council on Foreign Relations.

During her time in college, Anya devoted herself to mentorship, research, and service. She was a meditation leader and first-year retreat leader, as well as a fellow at the Georgetown Women’s Alliance and a sister of the Delta Phi Epsilon professional foreign service sorority. Besides, she is a Carroll Fellow, Pelosi Scholar, and Krogh Scholar. Anya co-founded The Polling Place, a nonpartisan, youth-led nonprofit dedicated to providing information on elections nationwide, as well as of Pick It Up, an educational initiative on the Earth Challenge App that enables universities to track plastic waste. In her free time, Anya enjoys taking nature photographs, exploring new coffee shops, and visiting museums.

For her Fulbright-Nehru research project, in order to better understand how poor water quality is disproportionately impacting Indian mothers, Anya is conducting environmental anthropology and policy research in New Delhi, with the aim of answering the question: what is the relationship between the inclusion of low-income mothers in water quality policy and mothers’ lived experiences in New Delhi? Anya is combining semi-structured in-depth interviews with media analysis and participant observation to learn how mothers are discussed in relation to the water crisis; she is also investigating policies on water quality.

Frances Walker

Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Project Title:	Examining the Expanding Landscape of Sustainable Menstruation in India
Field of Study:	Anthropology
Home Institution:	Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
Host Institution:	University of Delhi, Madurai, Delhi
Grant Start Month:	October 2023
Duration of Grant:	Nine months

Brief Bio:

Frances Walker has a bachelor’s in anthropology (medical) from Princeton University, New Jersey, with minors in global health and health policy; gender, sex, and sexuality; and African American studies. After graduating in 2022 as a Princeton University Henry R. Labouisse ’26 Fellow, Frances worked on the ground with Humans for Humanity, an Indian NGO, on its menstrual health and wellness campaigns and projects. Her current research work is a continuation of her previous senior thesis research titled “Deconstructing Menstruation in India: From Stigma to Visibility in Non-Governmental Organizations”, on historical stigma and taboo regarding menstruation and their contemporary consequences for menstruators in India.

Prior to working and researching in India, Frances served as the assistant manager of Semicolon Bookstore in Chicago where she organized literature-based community service events benefiting hundreds of Chicago kids; she also curated speaking engagements for authors. As a student, Frances was the president of the Princeton Women’s Rugby Football Club and served on its alumni board, as well as worked as a Princeton Writing Center Fellow to help undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty with a variety of academic-writing projects. She also served as a multi-year volunteer at Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center in the emergency medicine and orthopedics departments. Frances is still an avid fan of rugby and plays it in her free time. Outside of this, she loves trekking, traveling, and trying new foods.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Frances is seeking to further understand the current shift in India towards more sustainable and eco-friendly menstruation products. For this, she is locating the key actors in the realm of sustainable menstruation in order to determine why and how these products are marketed, as well as to understand what drives these entities to create change. She is also looking into the barriers that restrict the menstruators’ ability to switch to these products, and also examining the consequences of burgeoning menstrual waste as the majority of India’s population moved to using sanitary napkins in the last 10 years.