Environmental Sciences Archives

Adam Shaham

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

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

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

Anya Wahal

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.

Anuka Upadhye

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.

Caroline Troy

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.

George James

Prof. George James received his PhD in history and philosophy of religion from Columbia University in 1983. He served on the faculty of the University of North Texas from 1983 until his retirement and appointment as Professor Emeritus in 2020. In addition to his research on the activism and environmental philosophy of Sunderlal Bahuguna, titled Ecology Is Permanent Economy (State University of New York Press, 2013; Motilal Banarsidass, 2020; Hindi transl., 2022, Kannada transl., 2022), he is the author of Interpreting Religion (Catholic University of America Press, 1995), a study of phenomenological approaches to religion, and the editor of a volume of essays titled Ethical Perspectives on Environmental Issues in India (APH Publishing Corporation, 1999). For the past 30 years, he has been researching and publishing in the areas of comparative environmental philosophy and environmental movements in India. His research has been published in such journals as Zygon, International Philosophical Quarterly, and Worldviews. He has also contributed to the Encyclopedia of Religion, the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, and the Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy. He is interested in the relationship between the environmental values embedded in Indian religious traditions and environmental movements in India.

The Appiko Movement of Karnataka emerged in 1983 as a response to the degradation of the natural forests of the Western Ghats. Inspired by the non-violent ways of the Chipko Movement of the Western Himalaya, Appiko supported the forest biodiversity that sustained village economies. The concern for forest diversity led to projects that addressed the issue of the income of the forest dwellers. It also initiated legislation that limited environmental degradation in the Western Ghats and endorsed village sustainability. In his Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. James is employing archival research, interviews, and visits to Appiko project sites to produce a monograph on the origin, development, and achievements of the movement.

Phanikumar Mantha

Dr. Phanikumar Mantha is a professor of civil and environmental engineering (College of Engineering) and professor of MSU AgBioResearch (College of Agriculture & Natural Resources) at Michigan State University (MSU), East Lansing. He obtained his PhD in engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and worked as a scientist at the National Aerospace Laboratories, Bengaluru, where he developed models of estuarine and coastal ocean processes and received the Sir C.V. Raman Young Scientist Award for his work in 1996. His research interests encompass the scientific, technical, societal, and policy aspects of water involving water quantity, water quality, public health, and water–energy–food systems. As a faculty member at MSU for over 25 years, he has worked with students and colleagues to address societally relevant water issues. Examples include: the development of process-based, coupled, physical–chemical–biological models and their applications to understand and predict coastal water quality in the Great Lakes region of North America; quantifying the effects of droughts on crop yields in Kenya and in Cambodia in the Mekong River Basin; and integrated hydrologic modeling of watersheds in the U.S. and UK. He has published in journals like JGR Oceans, Limnology and Oceanography, Water Resources Research, and Journal of Hydrology. Prof. Mantha was also a Lilly Teaching Fellow at MSU.

Prof. Mantha’s research is funded by grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the United States Department of the Interior. He is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the International Association for Great Lakes Research and a fellow of the Geological Society of America.

The ecological products and services of India’s coastal environments are increasingly being impacted by harmful algal blooms (HABs). Effective strategies for their mitigation call for an understanding of the key factors behind their formation. Prof. Mantha’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying coastal water quality with a focus on HABs and the use of mathematical models and field observations to gain novel insights into important processes and drivers.

Jasmeet Judge

Dr. Jasmeet Judge received her BS in physics from Stillman College, Alabama, and her MS in electrical engineering, and PhD in electrical engineering and atmospheric, oceanic, and space sciences from the University of Michigan. She is a professor in the Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department at the University of Florida, where she is also the director of the Center for Remote Sensing.

Dr. Judge’s research interests include microwave remote-sensing applications to terrestrial hydrology, crop development, and crop growth; electromagnetic models for dynamic agricultural terrains; and machine learning (ML) methods for spatio-temporal scaling and data-model fusion. For her research projects, she has received grants from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She has led many field experiments with active and passive microwave sensors to develop/improve remote sensing, crop growth, hydrology, and ML algorithms. Dr. Judge has also won NASA Group Achievement Awards for interdisciplinary field campaigns. She has over 70 journal publications, three co-authored books, and numerous conference and invited presentations to her credit.

In addition to research, Dr. Judge has been active in advocating for the protection of the EM spectrum as the past member, vice chair, and chair of the National Academies Committee on Radio Frequency. She is also a member of the American Geophysical Union and a senior member of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, where she has served in different roles on many committees for the past three decades.

Dr. Judge’s Fullbright-Kalam project is being carried out in collaboration with researchers in the Interdisciplinary Center for Water Research at the Indian Institute of Science in utilizing data from the upcoming NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission for the availability of timely soil and crop information in India. In addition, she is training the next generation of Indian scientists in microwave remote sensing.