Brown University Archives

Safwan Islam

Safwan Islam is a first-generation college student and a recent graduate from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he received a BA in public health (with honors) and a BA in biology. As a part of his senior honors thesis, Safwan conducted an original grant-funded pilot study exploring the occupational health risks among gas station workers in the United States.

During his time at Brown, Safwan was the founding president of the Bengali Students’ Association (BSA) which has the goal of building a sense of community among the Bengali diaspora on the campus and its neighborhood. Among the 450 student groups at Brown, BSA was recognized by Brown as the Student Group of the Year in 2024. Safwan’s leadership extended beyond BSA and into student government, where he was elected by the student body as one of the 12 members of the Undergraduate Finance Board (UFB) to collectively manage a fund worth USD 2.1 million for activities of the campus student groups. Safwan is also highly involved in community health work, where he has served as a volunteer and assistant project manager for various projects at a free clinic in Providence.

Beyond academics, leadership, and public health work, Safwan spends a significant amount of time weightlifting, learning about new exercises, and applying exercise physiology to improve his workouts.

Safwan’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is examining how adults aged 18 to 65 diagnosed with hypertension in Delhi perceive the link between air pollution and hypertension, and how those perceptions shape adoption of protective or preventive behaviors. Using focus group discussions and in-depth interviews stratified by age and gender, the project is conducting a four-phase qualitative study affiliated with Ashoka University under the supervision of Dr. Poornima Prabhakaran. Safwan plans to disseminate the findings of the study in various languages through academic seminars, community sessions, and a policy brief aimed at informing counseling and prevention strategies both in India and the United States.

Ritikraj Arya

Ritikraj Arya is a 2023 graduate of Brown University, where he majored in biology. During his time at Brown, he was an avid volunteer with Camp Kesem, a nonprofit organization that provides free summer camps for children whose parents have been diagnosed with cancer. Through this work, he helped create a supportive environment for children navigating some of life’s most difficult circumstances.

Ritikraj’s passion for working with and supporting children shaped his postgraduate work as a researcher in pediatric end-of-life care at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). At UAB, he contributed to projects funded by organizations such as the Children’s Oncology Group, the National Institutes of Health, and the American Cancer Society. His work spanned a wide range of pediatric end-of-life care initiatives, including studies evaluating novel quality measures for pediatric end-of-life care and qualitative research involving bereaved parent interviews. His experiences conducting qualitative research in end-of-life care helped shape the direction of his Fulbright project studying pediatric palliative care in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.

Outside of his academic and professional work, Ritikraj enjoys cooking, reading, and spending time with his family.

Though home to only 3 percent of India’s population, the state of Kerala delivers nearly 90 percent of the nation’s palliative services by supplementing care with the efforts of local volunteers – an approach known as the “Kerala Model” of palliative care. Partnering with Loyola College of Social Sciences and Pallium India, Ritikraj’s Fulbright-Nehru project is conducting an ethnographic study examining how this model mobilizes community volunteers to provide high-quality pediatric palliative care. Through participant observation and in-depth interviews with volunteers, parents, and others, the project aims to generate insights that can inform global efforts to expand volunteer integration in pediatric palliative care amid critical physician shortages.

Pran Teelucksingh

Pran Teelucksingh recently received his BS in Chemistry and a BA in health and human biology from Brown University, Rhode Island. His research interests include bacterial metabolites and natural products. At Brown, Pran conducted research in the Kizer Lab, where he worked on optimizing the recombinant expression of glycan antigens in E. coli. He also served as a head tutor and teaching assistant for the organic chemistry sequence. He is especially interested in the intersection between public health and science. During his earlier years of college, he spent time in several student-led public health organizations and also co-published a research article on campus accessibility.

Outside of work, Pran enjoys hiking, baking, gardening, reading visual novels, and playing the trumpet and RPG video games.

Pran’s Fulbright-Nehru project is seeking to uncover novel antibiotic scaffolds and producers that can serve as the foundation for novel antimicrobial therapies. The research involves screening natural product extracts for bioactivity against Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria, identifying a bioactive extract, purifying the metabolite, and then characterizing the metabolite’s activity toward drug-resistant bacteria. The study is also mapping the biosynthetic gene cluster of such a metabolite by using the bioinformatic tool antiSMASH.

John (Ike) Uri

Mr. John Uri is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Brown University. He earned his BA in Sociology from the University of Kansas in 2017, before serving as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Tajikistan. He earned an MA in Sociology at Brown University in 2020. For his master’s thesis, Mr. Uri conducted interview-based research in India, working to understand how climate adaptation – efforts to reduce vulnerability to climate change – occurs in Indian cities. Such efforts are often funded by international donors, and that project illustrated how consultants, positioned between these donors and local urban officials, are a necessary part of urban adaptation planning in India. With the support of this Fulbright grant, Mr. Uri’s dissertation research will focus on these consultants and their role in urban climate adaptation, considering adaptation efforts in the city of Mumbai.

Apart from these primary research interests, Mr. Uri has conducted research at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conferences (the UN climate negotiations). In this capacity, Mr. Uri has considered the negotiations from a critical perspective, paying particular attention to the topics of climate finance and adaptation, as well as the nascent issue of loss and damage.

Cities in India face intensifying risks from the climate crisis, necessitating climate adaptation (actions and policies that reduce climate vulnerability). Urban adaptation planning is increasingly common in India, often carried out by consultants. This Fulbright-Nehru project intends to focus on these consultants, who coordinate the interests of international donors and urban officials. Using ethnographic research methods, Mr. Uri aims to embed himself in a firm in Mumbai that provides these services. The goal of this project is to better understand the ‘best practices’ of urban adaptation planning and how international norms and features of local governance impact those practices.

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.

Caroline Troy

Caroline Troy is a recent graduate of Brown University where she earned her BSc in environmental science, with a focus on conservation science and policy. For her senior honors thesis, she researched environmental predictors of biogeographical variations in woodpecker drumming. She has interned with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s ForestGEO program, Brooklyn College’s Urban Ecology and Environment NSF REU, Morgan State University’s Patuxent Environmental & Aquatic Research Laboratory, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Brown University Herbarium.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Caroline is researching the effect of urbanization on bat diversity in South India. In this context, she is carrying out passive acoustic monitoring across undeveloped to highly urbanized bat habitat sites in and around Bengaluru. India is home to around 130 bat species. However, these remarkable mammals are threatened by habitat loss due to urbanization, logging, and agriculture. It is estimated that a quarter of the bat species in India are vulnerable or endangered. In order to create effective conservation strategies, Caroline is examining which bat species can coexist with humans in developed regions and which may be threatened without habitat preservation.

Catherine Nelli

Catherine Nelli completed her BA with honors from Brown University in May 2023. There she studied Sanskrit classics, comparative literature, and international and public Affairs. Catherine also completed two senior honors theses, “On Nineteenth-Century Indology: Divergences between Sanskrit and Colonial French and English Reception of Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda” and “Between Empire and Post-Colonial Nation-Building: A Comparative Analysis of Nationalism’s Role in French India’s Decolonization in Chandernagore and Pondicherry (1947–1954)”. She is interested in colonial, transcultural literary reception, Sanskrit commentaries, and Bengali interactions with Sanskrit texts.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Catherine is accessing the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the Bhaktivedanta Research Center in Kolkata, the French Institute of Pondicherry, and the Records Centre archives in Puducherry. She is also working with her affiliates in the Sanskrit and comparative literature departments at Jadavpur University and the École française d’Extrême-Orient to investigate French and English colonial reception of the Gītagovinda, a classical Sanskrit love poem, in tandem and tension with intracultural Sanskrit and Bengali commentarial receptions.

Alexandra Blitzer

Alexandra Blitzer is a native of Westport, Connecticut, and a recent graduate from Brown University. She holds a BA in history and early modern world. She is passionate about gender policy, social change, legal studies, human rights, the performing arts, political journalism, and public service.

Prior to her Fulbright grant, Alexandra worked for the White House Gender Policy Council as an intern. She has also worked for Deloitte Consulting, Ernst & Young Climate Change and Sustainability Services, TIME’S UP Now, and the Biden–Harris campaign. Besides, she was the editor-in-chief of the Brown Political Review. She has significant experience living abroad, having spent time in Israel and Italy.

Alexandra has written extensively for the Brown Political Review on varied topics like reproductive rights, social justice, sustainability, and voting. She also wrote an undergraduate thesis, which was awarded honors, titled “Changing the Law, Changing a Community: Lamphere v. Brown University and The Opportunities and Limitations of Legal Remedies for Driving Social Change in the Workplace”. Her thesis was also awarded the Gaspee Chapter Daughters of the American Revolution Award. She is also a Birthright Excel Global Fellow (2021).

Outside of her work, Alexandra enjoys the performing arts, screenwriting, reading, spending time with friends and family, skiing, hiking, and crafting. Following her Fulbright-Nehru grant, she hopes to go to law school and continue her advocacy for women and girls as a policymaker in U.S. and international contexts.

Alexandra’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is bringing together the fields of labor, gender, law, and policy. Her research is focusing on the implementation and enforcement of India’s 2013 law titled “The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, or POSH Act. She is analyzing the benefits India’s economy would realize with the effective enforcement of this law. This project is significant because workplace sexual harassment is prevalent in India and the effective enforcement of the POSH Act would have major implications for the safety and well-being of women and girls, as well as for India’s economy as a whole.

Harshini Venkatachalam

Harshini Venkatachalam has a BA in computer science and visual art from Brown University. For six semesters, she was a teaching assistant in the computer science department at Brown and received a Senior Prize for contributions to the department. Harshini is broadly interested in using computing and technology for social good.

Harshini’s Fulbright-Nehru project is developing technology to help learners develop computational thinking skills. Computational thinking encompasses a range of skills in problem solving and system design, with one key skill being abstraction – the ability to overcome complexity by generalizing solutions. Harshini’s project is motivated by the need to understand how novice programmers learn abstraction within the existing pedagogy and thus develop novel methods to help them learn abstraction. During her study, in the course of development of tools, data is also being collected about participant engagement. The deliverables of the project include a novel tool (a mobile application), a literature review, and a detailed report.

Hamsa Shanmugam

Hamsa Shanmugam completed her BA with honors from Brown University in May 2024. At Brown, she pursued a double concentration in health and human biology and music. Hamsa’s undergraduate honors thesis in ethnomusicology presented a musicological analysis of Thēvāram from a Carnatic music perspective and compared melodic frameworks between Thēvāram and Carnatic music. Her research interests are in ethnomusicology, specifically, Thēvāram, ancient Tamil music, and Carnatic music.

Hamsa is a Carnatic vocalist and violinist. She is a disciple of Dr. B. Balasubrahmaniyan and “Sangita Kalanidhi” Lalgudi Vijayalakshmi. Hamsa performs solo concerts regularly across the U.S. and India. She is the recipient of numerous prizes, scholarships, and fellowships in music. In 2022, Hamsa was the winner of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations’ Pratibha Sangam Global Carnatic Music Competition and was invited by the Indian government to give a musical tour across India.

Hamsa is the founder and co-president of Brown Bhairavi, Brown University’s premier South Asian classical music group. She has also served as the marketing lead for MIT Heritage Arts of South Asia, an organization dedicated to promoting South Asian classical art forms. Following her year in India with the Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, as part of the Program in Liberal Medical Education, the only combined BS/MD program in the Ivy League, Hamsa will matriculate to the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University to complete her MD degree.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Hamsa is conducting ethnomusicological research on Thēvāram, the Tamil devotional music of the Saiva tradition. Her research is exploring how Thēvāram concerts can be performed within the Carnatic kutcheri (concert) structures while maintaining Thēvāram’s musical and lyrical integrity; she is doing so by using undigitized musical archives and working with affiliates at Annamalai University and the Kapaleeswarar Temple. This project is set to culminate in the presentation of a full-length Thēvāram concert in the Carnatic concert format. Hamsa hopes that her work will broaden the horizons of Western musicology, enrich Carnatic music, expand Thēvāram’s reach, and allow more Tamil audiences in both Tamil Nadu and the diaspora to reconnect with this ancient musical tradition.