Home Institution India: Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati

Ajay Salunkhe

Mr. Ajay Salunkhe is a doctoral student in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. His doctoral research is located in the intertwined histories of photography, archaeology, and museum movement. His doctoral dissertation titled, Framing the Nation: How Museums Tell Stories of India Through Photographs, enquires into the shifting and layered relationship between museums and photographs in post-independent India. He is interested in the potential of photographs to communicate ideas and establish power relations by telling (or not telling) the story of India through her museums, as well as the dynamics of the interactions between visitors and photographs in museum space.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, his research aims to probe the institutional use of photography in the museum and curatorial practices, both in India and abroad, that contributed to the post-colonial Indian imagination, with special reference to the use of photographs in the Festival of India in the US (1985-1986).

He has several years of curatorial, exhibiting, and education experience as part of a museum’s outreach program, which has lent depth and dialogue to his research. He can be found taking long walks at any hour of the day, catching Pokémon, when he is not reading.

Sourav Kumar

Mr. Sourav Kumar is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam. His doctoral research focuses on the evaluation of earthquake-induced changes in groundwater composition, commonly known as hydro-geochemical earthquake precursors (associated with the slow accumulation of tectonic stress in the Earth’s crust) in northeast India.

Mr. Kumar obtained his bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering at Uttarakhand Technical University, Dehradun, in 2016. He completed his master’s degree in Earth System Science and Engineering under the Department of Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam, in 2018. He received the MHRD-GATE Fellowship for two years of his M.Tech. in 2016, where he studied the spatio-temporal variability in India’s groundwater storage using GRACE data. As his research expanded and segued into his doctoral research, he has presented his work at international conferences in 2019 and 2021.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, his primary objective is to understand the links between earthquakes and hydrological/hydro-geochemical variation that could be used as basic scientific input required for an impending earthquake prediction at both national and international levels. The proposed study could be used to correlate datasets from northeast India with those from other parts of the world such as Iceland, Japan, Korea, Italy, China, and the United States, that have reported similar earthquake-induced changes in groundwater composition.

In addition to his academic engagements, he also led the cricket team of IIT Guwahati at the ‘All-India Inter-IIT Sports Meet’ during 2017-19 and held several student representative posts at the institutional level throughout his college years.

Shreya Shrikant Katre

Shreya Katre is a PhD candidate at the Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, where she works with Dr. Archana M Nair and Dr. Ravi K. She graduated from Walchand College of Engineering Sangli, Maharashtra, with a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering and a Master’s degree in Earth System Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. Her current research focuses on the geological carbon sequestration in selected rock formations of India. The goal of her research is to estimate the carbon storage potential of Indian basins and to identify novel carbon storage pathways using various geophysical and geochemical techniques.

Throughout her career, Shreya has participated in many social activities, workshops, technical quizzes, and was rewarded on various occasions. She has also worked as a bridge designer on a Metro rail project while working at STUP consultants Pvt. Ltd. She has presented her research at many national and international conferences through travel grants and has published in peer-reviewed journal and book chapters. Apart from this, Shreya is a Marathi language writer and poet and takes a special interest in Indian classical music.

As a Fulbright-Kalam Climate Fellow, her primary objective is to contribute to the science of carbon mineralization in ultramafic and basaltic rocks which paves a path to its applications in carbon management technologies. She will study the kinetics of carbonation and enhanced carbonation techniques to provide insights to the geochemistry of CO2-water-rock interactions. The application of this technology extends to in-situ carbon dioxide storage and ex-situ carbon dioxide removal methods.

Debasish Borah

Dr. Debasish Borah is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati. He obtained his MSc-PhD dual degree from IIT Bombay in 2012 and subsequently worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics, Tezpur University before joining IIT Guwahati in 2015. He has received several awards, including the Canadian Commonwealth Fellowship, Young Scientist Medal from the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), Young Scientist Award from the National Academy of Sciences, India (NASI) and the Government of Assam, India among others.

Dr. Borah’s research interest lies in the area of dark matter (DM), baryon asymmetry of the universe (BAU) and the origin of neutrino mass which cannot be explained by the standard model (SM) of particle physics, motivating the need for beyond standard model (BSM) physics. During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Borah is planning to study different BSM scenarios explaining the origin of BAU with the aim of probing them at ongoing and future colliders through conventional and new search strategies. He also plans to find synergy among collider probes and several indirect detection prospects at gravitational wave and cosmology experiments.