Field of Study USA: Public Health

Sonia Taneja

Dr. Sonia Taneja is a general pediatrician at Boston Medical Center and a clinical instructor at Boston University’s Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. She was most recently a chief resident at the Boston Combined Residency Program in Boston Medical Center and Boston Children’s Hospital, where she was engaged in curricular development for both domestic and global health equity education.

She holds a BA in psychology from Yale University and an MS in public health from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She is a former Parker Huang Research Fellow in India, where she conducted a mixed-methods study identifying the risk factors for mood disorders among caste-based sex workers in New Delhi and brothel-based sex workers in Kolkata and Patna. She obtained her MD from the Yale School of Medicine where she worked with the Elevate Policy Lab and the MOMS Partnership to replicate a community-based participatory research intervention for co-located social and mental health services for low-income parents.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, she is continuing her work with adolescents and families in partnership with the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh to develop a community-based participatory intervention mechanism to optimize medication-assisted therapy for opioid use disorder among adolescents in India. The goal of this research is to develop PYAR, or Parents as Youth Allies in Recovery, a family-centered behavioral intervention program designed to equip caregivers with skills to support medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) and HIV prevention among young people who inject drugs (YPWID). Dr. Taneja is utilizing community-based participatory research methods to interview youth who are under-engaged or have recently ceased MOUD and their caregivers to elicit the following: knowledge and attitudes about MOUD and HIV prevention services; challenges faced by YPWID and caregivers in recovery; and the intervention components that youth and caregivers identify as most effective and acceptable.

Amal Mitra

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

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

Purnima Madhivanan

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

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

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

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

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

Tobin Stauffer

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

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

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

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.

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.

Meher Kaur

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

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

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

Yasaswini Iyer

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

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

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