Duke University Archives

Aditya Santoki

Mr. Aditya Santoki graduated from Duke University in 2021 cum laude as a Chemistry major. While at Duke, Mr. Santoki was a neurobiology researcher in Dr. Cagla Eroglu’s lab and investigated the rate of neuronal cell death in Huntington’s Disease. Having self-studied computer science in college, Mr. Santoki designed a program that would characterize the rate of neuronal cell delineated by brain region, eventually seeing his work published as a second-author in Cell Reports. Additionally, while at Duke, Mr. Santoki was also deeply involved in health policy research. After having taken an Introduction to the U.S. Healthcare System class with Dr. Nathan Boucher, Mr. Santoki designed an independent project to assess the determinants of vaccine hesitancy in Durham County. As a part of his project, Mr. Santoki interviewed physicians and patients to find that even brief physician-led conversations on the safety and efficacy of vaccines could drastically reduce vaccine-hesitancy. Most importantly, Mr. Santoki learned how effective physician-led conversations on treatment could drastically affect patient care. This sparked Mr. Santoki’s interest in understanding how cost of care conversations on a national scale could reduce financial toxicity for patients. Since then, Mr. Santoki has published his work on vaccine hesitancy as a first-author in the North Carolina Medical Journal (NCMJ).

After graduating from Duke University, Mr. Santoki has been working as a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). At the NIH, Mr. Santoki routinely shadows neurooncologists having cost of care discussions with terminal cancer patients. Through these conversations Mr. Santoki has seen how patients can make much more informed decisions about their care and plan personalized and affordable courses of treatment. Moreover, Mr. Santoki has also been exposed to the potential of personalized medicine while working in Dr. Claire Le Pichon’s lab. While in the Le Pichon lab, Mr. Santoki has been assisting a project characterizing a novel mouse model of a rare form of ALS. Mr. Santoki has also been working part-time at a biopharma venture capital firm investigating drug pricing for rare disease therapeutics. Both these experiences have sparked Mr. Santoki’s interest in translating personalized therapeutics and ensuring they are affordable for patients. In his free time Mr. Santoki enjoys reading, weightlifting, and running.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Mr. Santoki is travelling to medical centers throughout Kerala to survey oncologists treating cancer patients. He is assessing physician awareness of treatment costs and low-cost alternatives. If time permits, Mr. Santoki aims to assess patients’ willingness to pay for genomic assays to define need for adjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer. He is also estimating the proportion of patients who get colitis after starting immunotherapy. These analyses will help physicians determine whether cost conversations on preventative treatments can prevent future expenses.

Rishabh Jain

Mr. Rishabh Jain graduated magna cum laude with Departmental Distinction in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University, where he was elected, in his junior year, to Tau Beta Pi. His research interests have spanned diverse fields, from bioengineering to technology policy to rural healthcare access. His senior thesis work as a Pratt Research Fellow consisted of designing a self-assembling, peptide-based supramolecular vaccine for Zika virus, for which he received the Howard G. Clark Award for Excellence in Research. He has also conducted research on injectable hydrogels for tissue repair after stroke as a Huang Fellow and has published on the pitfalls of thermal facial recognition during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences as a Bass Connections Research Fellow.

Mr. Jain is a contributor to the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s Editor’s Choice section and authored two chapters in an upcoming book on the ocular manifestations of systemic disease. He spent a summer interning at a CAR-T cell company and authoring an investment thesis on cell and gene therapy for a biotechnology-focused venture capital firm.

On campus, Mr. Jain served as Co-Founder and Co-President of the Duke chapter of Remote Area Medical (RAM), a national nonprofit that organizes free pop-up clinics to provide medical, dental, and vision care. With RAM, he led undergraduates and graduate students in multi-dimensional service, research, and advocacy efforts to improve healthcare access for underserved communities, culminating in the deployment of the first RAM clinic in North Carolina.

In his free time, Mr. Jain loves to cook and try new dishes. In 2019, he founded The Black Tile, a pop-up supper club where he served four-course tasting menus to six Duke students at a time. By donating profits to the local food bank, he has been able to provide almost 6000 meals to those in need. He also volunteered with Root Causes, an organization that delivers free, healthy food to food-insecure families.

India has the highest disease burden of uncorrected refractive error (URE) in the world, as measured by disability-adjusted life years. Refractive surgery has been able to vastly improve vision in patients with URE, but there are crucial decisions around the type and parameters of these surgeries that influence patient outcomes and affect postoperative complications. Mr. Jain’s Fulbright-Nehru project is focused on the use of artificial intelligence in refractive surgery, applying deep learning algorithms to the Indian population.

Sumathi Ramaswamy

Prof. Sumathi Ramaswamy is James B. Duke Professor of History, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. She has published extensively on language politics, gender studies, spatial studies and the history of cartography, visual studies and the modern history of art, and more recently, digital humanities and the history of philanthropy in modern India. She holds a master’s degree in History and MPhil in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; a Master’s in Anthropology from University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in History from the University of California (Berkeley). Prior to her appointment at Duke Univeristy, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Between 2002 and 2005, she also worked for the Ford Foundation in New Delhi as Program Officer for Education, Arts and Culture. Her monographs include Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India (1997); The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (2004); The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (2010), Husain’s Raj: Postcolonial Visions of Empire and Nation (2016); and Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe (2017). She is a co-founder of Tasveerghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture. Her most recent works are Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience (New Delhi: Roli Books), a digital project on children’s art titled B is for Bapu: Gandhi in the Art of the Child in Modern India, and a co-edited volume (with Monica Juneja) titled Motherland: Pushpamala N.’s Woman and Nation (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2022). She is currently working on a new project on educational philanthropy in British India.

Focusing on India’s first educational trust named Pachaiyappa’s Charities and on its connection to the man after whom it is named, Pachaiyappa Mudaliar (d. 1794), Prof. Ramaswamy’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to chart the birth of educational philanthropy in nineteenth-century Tamil India. She analyzes the emergence of secular education as a desirable public good; the transformation in the age of colonial capital of ancestral ideas about virtuous giving; and the political, economic, and ethical motivations for philanthropic support for secular education. She also considers questions endemic to philanthropy about power and personal influence as she delineates the role of private wealth in underwriting public education.

Devin Creed

Devin Creed is a PhD candidate in South Asian history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He has completed field exams in modern South Asian history, global British empire, food history, and science and empire. Devin’s dissertation examines the changes in the practices and ideologies of “giving for eating” in the context of famines in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia. He works with sources in Bangla, Hindi, Urdu, and English. At Duke, Devin has been a Kenan Graduate Fellow, a Capper Fellow in intellectual history, and a fellow at the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge. He has made public presentations on: the erotica of the pickle in South Asian literature and history; traces of Portuguese cuisine in modern West Bengal; the political theory of B.R. Ambedkar; and the history of Catholic missions in Meghalaya. His research interests include metabolic and ecological histories, food and fermentation, and capitalism and imperialism.

He has previously received grants to conduct research in Philadelphia (on the Knights of Labor), London (on British famine policy), Northern Ireland (on martyrdom in the Irish Republican Army), and India (on famine relief). He received his MA in modern European history from Villanova University (Pennsylvania) and his BA in economics and English literature from Hillsdale College (Michigan).

Devin is an avid cook and food experimenter who spends a good deal of his time pickling, fermenting, baking, and cooking. He enjoys reading science fiction, watching films, backpacking, hiking, singing, and learning languages.

Devastating famines punctuated British colonial rule in India, a period that saw famines in Bengal in 1770 and 1943 which killed over 10 million people. Devin’s Fulbright-Nehru project is arguing that the Indian responses to states of endemic malnutrition and famine played a significant role in creating the postcolonial regimes of food charity – what he calls “giving for eating” – in India today. Devin’s research is being driven by the following question: how did inherited understandings and practices of gifting food change in the face of widespread famine, new ideas of Western humanitarianism, and the birth of modern nutrition science?

Amariyah Ayee

Amariyah Ayee is a recent graduate of Duke University with a master’s degree in biomedical science. While at Duke, she volunteered with seniors in the Durham community and also served on the volunteer committee. She graduated from Claflin University as a valedictorian in 2022 with a degree in biology and a minor in chemistry. At Claflin, she enjoyed tutoring students as a supplemental instructor and also volunteered at the University Writing Center and Boys and Girls Club.

Amariyah has always desired to be a physician and serve individuals in underserved communities. She has been accepted to medical school on a full tuition scholarship, which she plans to pursue following her Fulbright experience. She is excited to serve as a cultural ambassador and share her love for learning with her students.

Devin Creed

Devin Creed is a PhD candidate in South Asian history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Devin’s dissertation examines the changes in the practices and ideologies of “giving for eating” in the context of famines in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia. At Duke, Devin has been a Kenan Graduate Fellow, a Capper Fellow in intellectual history, and a fellow at the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge. He has made public presentations on: the erotica of the pickle in South Asian literature and history; traces of Portuguese cuisine in modern West Bengal; the political theory of B.R. Ambedkar; and the history of Catholic missions in Meghalaya.

Devin’s Fulbright-Hays project is analyzing how South Asians contributed to, contested, and adapted nascent forms of Western humanitarianism, in the process forming hybrid cultures of care and charity. Concurrently, he is examining the arrival of modern nutrition science as a developmental technology of colonial governance which clashed with indigenous foodways. The phrase “giving for eating” highlights his novel approach to the study of famines; this approach combines an archaeology of annadana and other food-gifting practices with a material analysis of famine foods. This turn to the alimentary allows him to show the ways in which endemic famine became constitutive of modern regimes of charity and foodways in South Asia. Devin is accomplishing this through studying archival materials in Bangla, Urdu, Hindi, and English, and by drawing on neo-materialist methods to recreate famine foods.