Home Institution India: Vellore Institute of Technology

Guhananthan Arulprakash

Mr. Guhananthan Arulprakash is a PhD candidate at Applied Materials Laboratory, Department of Chemistry, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore. His doctoral research focuses on developing metal oxide-based electrocatalysts for water splitting applications. He believes that hydrogen energy would be the next alternative fuel to combat demand for fossil fuels and to reduce over-reliance on battery technology.

Guhananthan holds an integrated MSc Chemistry degree from Amrita Vishwa Vidhyapeetham, Coimbatore, India with a first-class distinction. After his masters, he worked as a Junior Research Fellow (JRF) in PSG Institute of Advanced Studies, Coimbatore, India under a DST-funded project where he worked on nanobubble technology. During his tenure as a JRF, he had the opportunity to work in collaboration with industry partners and designed a pilot-scale plant for the industry. This helped him to connect laboratory results with real world problems, and motivated him to research an alternative fuel, which is the current global demand.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow at the clean energy systems lab at Arizona State University, Guhananthan is working on developing new Ruddlesden Popper type perovskite oxides for electrocatalytic water splitting application. His research will also address the current challenges in sea water splitting, such as corrosion and other side reactions. His research will contribute to affordable green hydrogen production from sea water which is an ambitious goal for both USA and India.

Haseena Naji

Dr. Haseena Naji is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Sciences and Languages at Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai. In October 2023, she was awarded a PhD from the Central University of Tamil Nadu, Thiruvarur, for her thesis applying Vladimir Propp’s morphological framework alongside Ochs and Capps’ five-dimensional model of narrative to Kurichyan folksongs, demonstrating that indigenous oral narratives require culturally responsive analytical frameworks beyond universalist Western structural models.

Dr. Naji’s research interests lie at the intersection of structuralist narratology, indigenous narratives, and comparative folklore. Her work is grounded in sustained ethnographic fieldwork with the Kurichya tribe of Wayanad, Kerala, collecting, translating and interpreting their corpus of folksongs alongside the community’s broader ritual practices.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Elon University, Dr. Naji is conducting a comparative study of ritual speech among the Kurichya and the Gullah/Geechee of the southeastern United States. Both communities face pressures of ecological and cultural marginalization, making the comparison both theoretically significant and ethically urgent. The project tests whether a structuralist-performative framework, recalibrated to honor cultural specificity, can reveal how two distinct indigenous traditions encode memory, identity, and resilience through oral performance.

Geetha Manivasagam

As a woman scientist in STEM, Dr. Geetha Manivasagam started her research in her mid-30s and worked in various interdisciplinary areas. She completed her Master’s of Science and MPhil in crystallography and biophysics, but during the Ph.D. work, she shifted her focus towards biomaterial engineering for improving the quality of life in patients receiving implants.

She is currently the Director of Center for Biomaterials, Cellular and Molecular Theranostics (CBCMT), an interdisciplinary research facility to mobilize and materialize translational research. Considering her contributions in the field of Biomaterials, she was invited to be a part of a national initiative for preparing a road map for bioimplants in coordination with IIT ,DMRL, IISC, and Tata Health Care. Recently, she was invited by Springer Nature to be a member of the editorial team of the journal Invitro Model. She had been recognised as No. 1 scientist in Materials Science by MHRD from 2009-2019 and listed in the Top 2 % of scientists in the country in Materials Science as per the analysis performed by Stanford University.

Dr. Manivasagam’s Fulbirght-Nehru Fellowship work comprises developing a smart multimodal polymer-based bone-implant fortified with growth factors and anti-microbial agents for the controlled release of compounds as the conventional treatment modalities for treating bone infection are getting saturated with diminishing efficacy. This work is a novel approach with practical translational potential that can curb bone bacterial infection which is a global threat and aid rapid regeneration of bone.