USA Fellows Year: U.S. Fellows 2022-2023

Aditya Santoki

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

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

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

Karun Salvady

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

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

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

Alexa Russo

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

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

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

Catherine Ralph

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samantha (Sammy) Plezia

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

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

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

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

Shivani Patel

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

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

Supriya Pandit

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

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

Persis Naumann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abhi Nathan

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

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

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

Addie McKnight

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

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