Home Institution India: Indian Institute of Technology Bombay

Ansuman Halder

Dr. Ansuman Halder obtained his B.Sc. degree from Scottish Church College, University of Calcutta, in 2011 and then joined the M.Sc.-Ph.D. dual degree program at the Department of Energy Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, Mumbai. He pursued his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Shaibal K. Sarkar and received his dual degree in 2020. His research work was focused on understanding the structural and opto-electronic properties of various hybrid halide perovskite materials for photovoltaic applications.

Besides publishing several research articles in reputed international journals, Dr. Halder filed a patent for development of perovskite based thermochromic photovoltaic devices during his Ph.D. He was awarded the prestigious Bhaskara Advanced Solar Energy (BASE) fellowship in 2017 for a 3 month internship at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Colorado. After finishing his Ph.D., Dr. Halder joined Bar-Ilan University, Israel in 2020 as a postdoctoral fellow and worked with Prof. David Cahen to understand the electrical and electronic properties of hybrid perovskite materials.

Use of solar power for energy generation is highly advantageous as it is abundant and pollution free. In recent times, perovskite based solar cells have emerged as one of the most promising technologies to provide solar generated electricity at lower costs. During his Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship, Dr. Halder is focusing on understanding the growth dynamics of the large-scale perovskite thin film formation that is essential for development of perovskite based solar cell technology.

Pavithra Venkataraman

Ms. Pavithra Venkataraman is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai. Her research is in the area of evolutionary biology. Specifically, she uses experimental methods to understand the evolution of proteins, and theoretical methods to understand the evolution of metabolic cooperation and sympatric speciation in a population.

Ms. Venkataraman completed her bachelor’s in chemical engineering from M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bengaluru. In 2020, she was awarded the Best Outgoing Chemical Engineering Student by the Bangalore Chapter of the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers. She enjoys exploring new places, cuisines and cultures. She also likes learning new languages.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, she will work with Prof. Sergey Kryazhimskiy to characterize the variation in the local structure of fitness landscapes to assess the predictability of evolution. This work is important to build our understanding of the process of evolution as a whole and has implications for pathogen evolution and human health.

Vikram Vishal

Dr. Vikram Vishal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences and an associate faculty in the Interdisciplinary Programme in Climate Studies, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, Mumbai. He leads the ‘Computational and Experimental Geomechanics’ group at IIT Bombay. Dr. Vishal worked at IIT Roorkee over 2013-16, during which he pursued the Fulbright-Nehru postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. Dr. Vishal also serves as the Convener of the DST-sponsored ‘National Centre of Excellence in Carbon Capture and Utilization’ at IIT Bombay. He is a recipient of two national awards and holds the young scientist recognition from all major science academies in India. He is currently a member of the Indian National Young Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Vishal’s research interests are in the domains of geomechanics, carbon capture and sequestration, enhanced petroleum recovery and unconventional hydrocarbon systems.

During his Fulbright-Kalam Climate Fellowship at MIT, he aims to develop an integrated risk assessment framework using experimentally validated simulations for CO2 storage in a mature oilfield in India. This research work will build on evaluating the storage readiness of specific fields in an onshore sedimentary basin. Detailed understanding of the barriers and their elimination will be key to successful deployment of carbon capture and storage in India, and advance their readiness levels.

Jayesh Sonwane

Dr. Jayesh Manohar Sonawane obtained his Ph D from the Department of Energy Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Maharashtra, under the s upervision of Prof. Prakash Chandra Ghosh and the Department of Chemistry, Monash University, Australia under the supervision of Prof. Samuel Adeloju. His Ph D research focuses on the development of conducting polymer electrodes for microbial fuel cells for power generation and wastewater treatment. Dr. Sonawane is a recipient of the prestigious “Excellence Research award 2016-18” from Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India.

During his PhD , he was awarded the Shastri Fellowship from the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute and went to Toronto University where he worked on Elucidation electric properties of engineered E. coli with pilA gene from Geobacter sulfurreducens, at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry. Later, he joined a postdoctoral researcher in the same department, w here he worked on a hybrid bioelectrochemical treatment process for liquid stream for the “Reinventing the Toilets” project funded by the Bill & Melinda G ates F oundation. Dr. Sonawane is currently working on a microfluidics bioelectrochemical system for understanding electroactive biofilms at Université Laval, Quebec, Canada.

Protein nanowires are a revolutionary green sustainable electronic material with unique physical, chemical, and biological properties that offer substantial advantages over other nanowire materials for biomedical and environmental sensing. The project will explore novel concepts for the large-scale separation of the wires from the cells. High throughput methods will be optimized for the fabrication of sensors specifically designed for four different analytes to demonstrate a range of high commercial relevance in clinical and environmental sensing. Dr. Sonawane is supported by the Fulbright-Nehru F ellowship and is working with scientist Prof. Derek R Lovley at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA.

Sharmistha Saha

Sharmistha Saha is assistant professor of Performance Studies at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai. She completed her PhD from the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany. Erasmus Mundus followed by the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded her doctoral study. Later, she was a DFG postdoctoral fellow at Dahlem Research School, Berlin, Germany. She has been a UGC Junior Research Fellow at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. In the past she has been a Becas MAEC-AECID fellow at the Universidad de Granada, Spain. Her research interests include theatre historiography, performance philosophy, colonial theatre, theories of acting, aesthetics and politics, archive and the arts and critical theory. She is the author of Theatre and National Identity in Colonial India: Formation of a community through cultural practice (Springer/Aakar, 2017). Sharmistha is also a theatre practitioner and some of her directorial work includes ‘Playing to Bombay’ co-created with Sunil Shanbag, ‘Her Letters’ commissioned by the Tagore Centre in Berlin, ‘Romeo Ravidas aur Juliet Devi’ amongst others. She most recently was part of the international inter-medial project ‘Elephants in Rooms’ facilitated by the German-UK based Gobs Squad Arts Collective. She has closely worked with the theatre stalwart Eugenio Barba and his company Odin Teatret in Denmark.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship Sharmistha will be working on the project ‘Community identity, cultural performance and value: politics of intercultural exchange between the ‘west’ and postcolonial India’ at the TISCH School of the Arts, New York University. Her work will focus on politics of community identity, cultural performances as inheritance and its associated value in the context of ‘intercultural theatre’.

Ranjith Padinhateeri

Dr. Ranjith Padinhateeri is a professor in the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay). Dr. Padinhateeri’s lab focuses on theoretical studies to understand various biological phenomena using a variety of tools from physics, including statistical mechanics, polymer physics, and soft-matter theory. His specific areas of interest include nucleosome dynamics, chromatin assembly, DNA mechanics, and the self-assembly of proteins.

Dr. Padinhateeri completed his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, and the Institute Curie, Paris. He gained expertise in applying physics principles to understand biological systems. Dr. Padinhateeri joined the IIT Bombay faculty in 2009. He and his team developed computational models to investigate the kinetics of nucleosomes and the polymer organization of chromatin. Dr. Padinhateeri has received several awards, including the National Bioscience Award from the Department of Biotechnology India.

Dr. Padinhateeri’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to develop a model to understand chromatin organization —the organization of the genetic material— in space and time inside a cell nucleus, accounting for nucleosome dynamics. The predictions from computational studies of the model could help us to design gene regions that can have specific chromatin states. As a part of the fellowship, Dr. Padinhateeri also plans to teach a course on modeling biological processes covering stochastic processes, Monte Carlo simulations, and molecular dynamics simulations.

Sandip Kumar Saha

Dr. Sandip Kumar Saha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. He works in the broad area of thermal energy storage, solar receivers, and cooling technologies. His primary research interest is exploring the different types of thermal energy storage for solar thermal applications. In recent years, he has been actively involved in developing and demonstrating new technologies for thermal energy storage, solar receiver, and green building.

Dr. Saha received his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. He was with R&D TATA Steel, India, as a Researcher, and Applied Mechanics and Energy Conversion, Department of Mechanical Engineering, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, as a postdoctoral fellow before joining IIT Bombay as a faculty member in 2012. Since then, he has carried out several large, funded projects in thermal energy storage. Prof. Saha is a recipient of the Bhaskara Advanced Solar Energy (BASE) Fellowship, IUSSTF, 2016. He was awarded the IIT Bombay research award 2020. He is currently serving on the editorial boards of Scientific Reports.

Dr. Saha’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to develop a new high thermal conductive solid-solid phase change material that can be stable for more than few thousands of thermal cycles for low-temperature solar applications (<80 C). A detailed investigation of the thermophysical properties using state-of-art experimental and computational facilities will be carried out to optimize the process parameters and the filler materials. Specifically, an emphasis will be given to understanding the contact between filler polymer interfaces and interfacial thermal resistance. For his teaching component, Prof. Saha is team-teaching a course on advanced engineering thermodynamics with his host. To ensure synergy between the two components, interested students from the course will be involved in analysing and thereby enhancing the performance of energy systems using thermal energy storage through the research work.

Navinya Dilip Chimurkar

Mr. Navinya Dilip Chimurkar is a research scholar in climate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai. He is working with Prof. Harish C. Phuleria and Prof. Chandra Venkataraman to understand the climate impact of highly overlooked non-cooking residential activities in India. He has conducted surveys and emission measurement campaigns to characterize the carbonaceous aerosol emissions from biomass and kerosene burning for water heating, space heating, and kerosene lighting.

Mr. Chimurkar has completed his master’s in climate science and technology from the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, Odhisha and his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Rajiv Gandhi College of Engineering, Research and Technology, Chandrapur. He has published various articles, a policy brief and a book chapter on air quality. Apart from research, Mr. Chimurkar is a Hindi poet and has participated in many poetic events. He represented his master’s institute at Inter-IIT Cultural Meet for poetry. He is also a yoga enthusiast and has won a district-level competition.

During his Fulbright-Kalam Climate fellowship, Mr. Chimurkar is quantifying the climate impact of brown carbon particles from various sources using the state-of-the-science multi-wavelength spectrophotometer and Mie-theory modeling. The outcome of this research will improve climate assessment and aid in preparing a regional mitigation plan for India.

Sakshi Shukla

Ms. Sakshi Shukla is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB), Mumbai. The aim of her Ph.D. thesis is to identify a biomarker to predict Levodopa Induced Dyskinesia (LID) in Parkinson’s disease patients based on multimodal neuroimaging, clinical and behavioral characteristics. She is one of the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN) Global Scholars selected in 2022 to participate in the online MRI graduate program and clinical neuroimaging course at Oxford University, UK.

Ms. Shukla has completed her bachelor’s degree in zoology (H) from Daulat Ram College, University of Delhi. Later, she pursued her master’s in medical biotechnology and graduated as a gold medalist from Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak. She has qualified exams such as CSIR-UGC NET JRF, GATE, BET, CEEB, IIT-JAM. Beyond academics, she loves to interact with people and acquire new skills. She is an outdoor enthusiast and loves to travel to natural places.

During the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship tenure, Ms. Shukla is learning newer techniques in medical imaging for movement disorders, such as Neuromelanin MRI, and NODDI (neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging). She intends to draw meaningful inferences from the collected data with the help of a clinical neuroimaging expert.

Satish Kumar

Mr. Satish Kumar is a doctoral candidate and Senior Research Fellow (UGC-JRF/NET) at Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, Maharashtra. His Ph.D. research links agricultural production with nutritional food security through agriculture diversification in the semi-arid climate. His research interests include agriculture-nutrition linkages, food and nutrition security, sustainable agriculture, and policy process and policy design in Indian agriculture.

Before joining IIT Bombay for his M. Phil., Mr. Kumar earned his bachelor’s and master’s in geography from Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi respectively. For his M. Phil. dissertation, he developed a land use vulnerability index (LUVI) for the Mumbai metropolitan region to suggest sustainable land use planning using empirical evidence.

Mr. Kumar has presented his work at many international conferences. In addition, he represented India in the NTU-STEP scholar program at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and assisted the TIGR2ESS project in India, which is a research collaboration of Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and the University of Cambridge. He has delivered several lectures on agriculture sustainability and urban agriculture. He is also a university rank holder in the undergraduate program and represented the University of Delhi at several state-level table tennis tournaments.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Mr. Kumar is developing econometric models identifying the agriculture production and nutrition relationship in a geographical setting. He believes that his research will enable agriculture-dependent small and marginal farmers to achieve nutritional and food security through agricultural diversification.