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Narayanan Kuthirummal

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

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

Umesh Garg

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

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

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

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

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

Karen Daniels

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.

Meenakshi Singh

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.

Abel Abraham

Abel Abraham completed his BS in mathematics and biomedical engineering from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). He will be joining the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering to pursue his PhD following his Fulbright-Nehru research period. Abel’s broad interests are in active matter and its intrinsic connections to biology. He specifically wants to understand collective behaviors and the emergence of order and organization in multicellular systems.

Abel is an experimentalist who tries to understand complex systems from the perspective of physical and mathematical principles. During his four-year degree program, while working with Prof. Pedro Saenz at UNC’s Physical Mathematics Lab, he was experimenting with vibrated fluid interfaces, particularly Faraday waves and walking droplets. His experiments with Faraday waves demonstrated similar statistical features with non-equilibrium systems at different scales, leading to a paper under review of which he is a co-author. Abel has also done experiments and simulations to show an absence of diffusion in walking droplets which is analogous to the localization of electrons in disordered potentials. This led to his first-author paper which is also under review.

In his Fulbright-Nehru program, Abel is working with Prof. Shashi Thutupalli in the Simon’s Centre for the Study of Living Machines at the National Centre for Biological Sciences. He is studying active matter systems of stronger biological connection like active droplets and polymers, and exploring how memory affects the dynamics of these active droplet and polymer systems. In this process, Abel aims to gain more experience in the space between physics and biology, which is where he will continue working during his PhD.

Arjendu Pattanayak

Prof. Pattanayak is a mathematical and computational physicist with over 30 peer-reviewed publications on problems in irreversibility and entropy in complex dynamics, with a focus on quantum systems (“quantum thermodynamics” or “quantum chaos”). He got his undergraduate degree from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, his master’s from Brown University, and his PhD from The University of Texas at Austin. After his postdoctoral training at the University of Toronto and a visiting position at Rice University, he has been with Carleton College since 2001 where students from his group have helped build the now-burgeoning quantum information industry. His recent research has shifted to also include biophysics, and explores applied and interdisciplinary complexity alongside challenging thermodynamics questions about the statistical mechanics of cell fates using innovative information theory approaches and tools.

Prof. Pattanayak has served as chair of his department and as an associate dean of the college. He has also co-organized conferences on liberal arts universities in India as well as led study abroad programs to India. He has held fellowships at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara twice. He has also been hosted for long-term research and teaching visits by the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, the National University of Singapore, the University of Insubria in Como, the University of Perugia, and the University of New Mexico.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Pattanayak is teaching a course at Ashoka University on contemporary topics in quantum physics by advancing beyond the typical undergraduate quantum course to introduce students to the rapidly growing frontiers of quantum information and quantum computing technology. This will build on his previous work at Carleton and involve Ashoka students in creating a strong course for future students at both institutions, as well as enable others to teach it in the long run by sharing elements of the final course with the broader community. Prof. Pattanayak also hopes to seed bilateral research and pedagogy exchanges and long-term connections between Ashoka and Carleton.