Home Institution India: Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay

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.

Koushikey Chhapariya

Ms. Koushikey Chhapariya is a doctoral student at the Satellite Image Processing Lab, Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering (CSRE), IIT Bombay, Mumbai. She is working on an object-oriented deep CNN-based model for detecting selective features on hyperspectral images as part of her Ph.D. research. She is also a recipient of the Indo-French Raman-Charpak Fellowship 2022. She joined LISTIC Lab, Université Savoie Mont Blanc as a visiting research scholar in France to conduct a part of her Ph.D. thesis work. There she worked on a multi-task deep learning model for hyperspectral data for six months.

Ms. Chhapariya received the Prime Minister Research Fellowship in May 2021 under the lateral entry scheme. She completed her Master of Technology (M.Tech) from the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (IIRS), ISRO, Dehradun. As part of her master’s project, she developed a kernel-based Modified Possibilistic c-Means (MPCM) algorithm in the fuzzy-logic-based domain to handle non-linearity in data. She was also an intern with the Indian Institute of Human Settlement (IIHS), Bengaluru, where she worked on a data management portal, administrating metadata and web-portal development. Her research interest lies in the processing and analysis of satellite images, such as hyperspectral, multispectral, and thermal data. She loves to travel, explore new places, and read in her free time.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Chhapariya is focusing on developing a deep learning-based object detection and feature extraction model for hyperspectral satellite image analysis.

Sreerupa Bhattacharya

Ms. Sreerupa Bhattacharya is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay, Mumbai, where she examines the works of women photographers in twentieth-century India. By tracing a genealogy of women’s photographic practices, her Ph.D. seeks to explore hitherto obscured archives in order to engender the history of photography in India as well as provide fresh insights into the gendered lifeworlds of women in the twentieth century. Her research interests include visual culture, gender studies, technology studies and South Asian history.

Ms. Bhattacharya completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies in English literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, where she was awarded the Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (Sylff) for an independent research project on the Jewish community of Kolkata. She was a Young India Fellow at Ashoka University, where she received a postgraduate diploma in liberal studies. She also worked as Teaching Assistant at Ashoka University and IIT Bombay for a range of courses on gender and sexuality, film studies, literary culture and language training.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, she is undertaking archival research, gaining interdisciplinary methodological insights into the study of visual culture, and engaging with a global community of scholars and curators working on gender and photography.