Home Institution USA: Emory University

Aanya Ravichander

Aanya Ravichander is a recent graduate of Emory University, where she earned a BA in human health with a minor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. A passionate patient advocate, Aanya’s research work centers on applying narrative medicine and patient stories in care settings. She has researched the use of language as a tool for child survivors of sexual violence and worked on mental health care access for both incarcerated and unhoused individuals. At Emory, she worked with laboring refugee moms and supported incarcerated survivors of domestic violence during their parole. A particular emphasis of her work is on how sociodemographic indicators, like maternal education and the Child Opportunity Index, impact outcomes for marginalized groups.

Aanya aspires to be a compassionate physician who accords priority to patient experiences in her care. She hopes to continue to unearth areas of research in the intersections of clinical medicine and the humanities. Beyond her work, Aanya loves to play the drums, hang out with friends, work out, and explore local culture and cuisine.

Aanya’s Fulbright-Nehru research project sits at the intersection of women’s health and cultural expectations surrounding motherhood. She is studying postpartum depression and abuse in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, unpacking how community health workers and mothers respond to postnatal mental health challenges. Aanya hopes to determine the barriers to detecting, diagnosing, and treating abuse and postpartum depression to better serve the vulnerable populations. Using a mixed-methods approach, the project is analyzing both participant interviews and verified mental health scales to assess how to drive equitable, patient-centered care.

Paul Koster

Paul Koster is a professor of practice at Emory University School of Law where he teaches legal writing, legal advocacy, legal profession, and introduction to the U.S. legal system. He is also the faculty advisor to the Emory Law School Supreme Court Advocacy Program and co-faculty advisor to the Emory Moot Court Society. He was awarded the Minister Gloria Jean Fowler Angel Award by the Emory Law Class of 2024, Professor of the Year title by the Emory Black Law Students Association in 2023, and the Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Education in 2021.

Prof. Koster practiced law for nearly 20 years, including 10 years as managing partner of a boutique Atlanta law firm which he cofounded. While in practice, he was named a Georgia Super Lawyer on multiple occasions. Following his law school education, he served as a staff attorney for the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (DC) Circuit and as a judicial clerk for the Honorable Stephanie Duncan-Peters of the DC Superior Court. Prof. Koster is the 2024–2026 chair of the Pro Bono Committee for the Legal Writing Institute, a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and a faculty member for the National Institute for Trial Advocacy.

Kelsey Gray

Dr. Kelsey Gray, PhD, is an educator and writer specializing in genetics, molecular biology, and intercultural science communication. She earned her BS in biomedical science from the Ohio State University before completing her PhD in genetics and molecular biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where her doctoral research focused on the molecular mechanisms of spinal muscular atrophy. Following her doctoral work, Dr. Gray served as a postdoctoral fellow with the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI) at Emory University.

A cornerstone of her international work was her first Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship (2019–2020) at Drepung Loseling Monastic University, Karnataka, India. During this fellowship, she engaged in deep intercultural exchange, teaching biology courses and collaborating with Tibetan scientists to conduct culturally responsive educational research. Dr. Gray’s professional trajectory includes serving as an assistant professor and the assistant director for the Grand Challenges Initiative at Chapman University, as well as working in the private sector as a regulatory medical writer. As the senior instructional content developer for ETSI, she leads the development of the ETSI bilingual digital learning platform. Her extensive publication record reflects interdisciplinary expertise, spanning from protein biochemistry to the nuances of monastic science learning and metacognition.

Dr. Gray’s Fulbright-Nehru project, “A Two-Way Exchange: Buddhism and Science in Modern Tibetan Monastic Education,” is supporting science education for monastics in India through three integrated initiatives. She is leading a workshop to train monastic leaders on the ETSI Online Learning Platform in order to foster digital literacy and expand curriculum reach. She is also conducting a Human Health seminar series across five monastic institutions, connecting clinical research with monastic interests. Further, she is teaching an advanced biology teacher training course, utilizing modules on immunology and epigenetics to equip monastics with specialized pedagogical skills for future sustainable instruction.

Anya Fredsell

Anya Fredsell is a doctoral student in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. Her academic interests include South Asian religions, Tamil language and culture, gender and sexuality studies, and ethnography of religion. Her research relies on ethnographic methodologies to examine relationships among families, land, and deities in contemporary Tamil Nadu, India. Anya received her BA in religious studies from Elon University and an MTS in global religions from Emory’s Candler School of Theology.

Anya’s Fulbright-Nehru research project on place-based Hindu deities is examining, through ethnographic fieldwork, the shifting relationships between families, land, and religious practices in contemporary South India. Her research is analyzing the worship of Tamil lineage deities (kula devams) – the gods who are passed down generationally in families and who reside on ancestral land – to explore how conceptions of lineage and religious devotion are intimately tied to land and negotiated through the worship of place-based deities in South India. Despite contemporary processes of urbanization and migration that relocate families away from their native land, Tamil people continue to worship these deities by returning to ancestral villages or conducting elaborate rituals to permanently move their deities closer to the family. Drawing on her established research contacts and advanced Tamil language proficiency, Anya is following such movements of people and place-based deities by observing festivals and life-cycle rites, and through semi-structured interviews on family histories and deity narratives. The study is taking place in a village near the urban center of Madurai, Tamil Nadu. This project will form the basis of Anya’s doctoral dissertation at Emory University and is expected to culminate in her first book.

Abia Fazili

Abia Fazili is a poet from Salt Lake City, Utah. She graduated in English and creative writing from Emory University. She writes fiction about South Asian immigrant and diaspora experiences, and poetry about the natural world, love and heartbreak, and anything that may inspire her. At Emory, she worked as an editor of the university’s literary magazine for several years. She is interested in the interdisciplinary application of poetry and works with cancer patients and their family members at writing workshops. Abia’s research interests lie in the history of Indian mystics and the use of Indian poetic traditions in contemporary Western literature.

Abia’s Fulbright-Nehru research project, based in Hyderabad, is studying the poetic traditions and practices of both the Hindu Bhakti and Islamic Sufi streams. Her research is identifying the techniques and elements of both traditions’ poetry and comparing them with methods used by contemporary Western poets. She expects her research and immersive experiences to aid her in writing her own collection of modern, mystic poems.

Jahnavi Chamarthi

Jahnavi Chamarthi is a recent graduate of Emory University, where she earned a BA in political science with a minor in predictive health. A member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and Emory’s 100 Senior Honorary, she was awarded the highest honors for her thesis investigating how the intersectional representation of women from Scheduled Caste and Tribe backgrounds in Indian state legislatures influences budgetary and legislative outcomes on healthcare and education policies for lower caste women. Drawing on theories of descriptive and substantive representation, her work introduced an original quantitative index to assess how identity-based leadership shapes legislative priorities.

Jahnavi’s interdisciplinary approach to research is reflected in her forthcoming co-authored article, “Cultivating Attentiveness to Law in India through Legal Anthropology”, in the Socio-Legal Review. At Emory, she served as a research assistant at the School of Law, a staff writer for the Emory Political Review, and as an intern at the Center for Civic and Community Engagement. Her leadership roles in Emory’s South Asian cultural and dance organizations further underscore her commitment to building inclusive, collaborative spaces rooted in cultural identity.

Jahnavi’s Fulbright-Nehru research is building directly on her undergraduate thesis. Through interviews with legislators, policy advocates, and public health stakeholders, she is examining how caste and gender influence the implementation – not just adoption – of maternal health programs in Tamil Nadu. She is exploring how women from marginalized caste backgrounds in legislative bodies, who share identities with their constituents, translate descriptive representation into substantive policy advocacy and implementation. The study is also examining the effects of India’s quota systems, which reserve seats for lower caste individuals and women. Using a mixed-methods approach, the research is analyzing stakeholder interviews and quantitative data on healthcare access in order to assess maternal healthcare implementation in districts of varying intersectional representation. Her project aims to advance a deeper understanding of intersectional political representation and its potential to drive more equitable public health outcomes in Tamil Nadu.

Anish Bagga

As a graduate from Emory University with aspirations of entering the medical field and a passion for mathematics and computer science, Anish Bagga seeks to connect the medical world with math and machine learning. By bridging these fields, he hopes to bring a unique approach to patient care and medical research. At Emory, he was involved with the Emory International Relations Association as the head delegate of the Model UN team and also helped found Oxford’s Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Activist organization. Anish’s current research involves modeling influenza reassortment, building a computational model of the human thyroid hormone, and using machine learning to reconstruct electrocardiography profiles. His research in influenza resulted in a publication which stated that avian hosts do not stringently select against less-fit influenza A virus (IAV) strains, thus facilitating the reassortment of diverse IAVs which increases the likelihood of zoonosis. His second publication regarding influenza A reassortment ascertained that the respiratory structure within a host like swine could support increased diversity through reassortment; this he did through the construction of reassortment simulations in non-compartmentalized respiratory systems and compared its results to the data from the extensively compartmentalized swine lungs. Based on the results, it was determined that compartmentalization does not increase viral diversity; instead, it provides pockets where viruses that are less fit for swine but more fit for humans can thrive. The research helped elucidate the importance of swine in the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic.

Vaccines elicit a stronger immune response through the injection of a weakened virus which facilitates the formation of germinal centers containing a viral fragment: i.e., an antigen. In affinity maturation, B cells with B cell receptors (BCRs) that strongly bind to the antigen are selected for. These B cells secrete antibodies identical to their BCRs which bind to the viral components during infection, thus marking the virus for destruction. The more selective this process, the greater the antibody binding affinity, and thus a greater future immune response. To optimize the influenza A vaccine, a stochastic simulation of affinity maturation is also being developed during the study.

Nitya (Deepa) Das Acevedo

Dr. Deepa Acevedo is a legal anthropologist and a law and society scholar. Her research blends ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological theory with doctrinal and policy analysis to provide new insights into legal rules and institutions. Dr. Acevedo is an associate professor of law at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her JD and PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago and her BA in politics from Princeton. Her monograph, The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2023. Her articles have been published or are forthcoming in, among others, Law & Social Inquiry, Duke Law Journal, the American Journal of Comparative Law, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the Asian Journal of Law and Society, and Modern Asian Studies. She has also guest-edited several special collections: a pair of issues in Alabama Law Review and Law & Social Inquiry focusing on interdisciplinary engagements between law and anthropology; a virtual issue in Law & Society Review on legal anthropology (with Anna Offit); and a collection on “constitutional ethnography” appearing via ICONnect – the blog of the International Journal of Constitutional Law.

Constitutions are documents for everyday life. Despite this, the study of constitutional law remains largely cabined to rarified contexts, elite actors, and written materials. Dr. Acevedo’s Fulbright-Nehru project is connecting the theoretically weighty field of constitutional law with the nuanced empirical insights afforded by anthropology to show how a diverse collection of Indian actors define, refine, and mobilize their national charter. In particular, Dr. Acevedo’s project is using the recently popular concept of “constitutional morality” to explore how ordinary citizens engage with and mobilize their Constitution.

Christopher Gadomski

Christopher Gadomski graduated with a major in neuroscience and behavioral biology and a minor in religion from Emory University where he studied the epigenetic underpinnings of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. During his time there, he volunteered as an advanced emergency medical technician and also served as the technical director for Emory’s internet Radio Station, WMRE. Since graduation, he has been researching in the area of neuroimmunology of brain metastases using computational and in vitro techniques. He plans to pursue a career in medicine and increase healthcare accessibility for the marginalized communities.

For more than 60 years, the Tibetan people have lived in exile to escape forced secularization and preserve their way of life. And they have succeeded despite immense hardship, as illustrated by the fact that their unique culture and religious practices now thrive in Dharamshala and around the world. What underlies this resilience against persecution and displacement? Chris’s Fulbright-Nehru project is helping to document, preserve, and promote the oral histories of the Tibetan exile community. This documentation of life in exile – past, present, and future – may provide an insight into how to cultivate resilience in other refugee communities and instill the values of compassion and well-being in the face of hardship.