Georgetown University Archives

Rushil Vashee

Rushil Vashee earned a BS summa cum laude in international political economy from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service in 2025. He was awarded the Dean’s Medal for earning the highest cumulative GPA in the school. Rushil’s senior thesis, awarded departmental honors, leveraged an original database on international lending to explore why some countries rejected international assistance during COVID-19.

During his time at Georgetown, Rushil interned at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and the Edunomics Lab. He was also an intern with the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University. While studying abroad at Ecuador’s Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Rushil was a research assistant in the Laboratory of Computational and Experimental Economics. Rushil’s time in Ecuador, shaped by everyday conversations with his host family, classmates, and taxi drivers, deepened his curiosity about how social dynamics shape access to opportunity in urban economies.

Beyond academic and policy work, Rushil is an experienced journalist. He has published over 100 articles about the National Football League for USA TODAY Sports. A holder of a journalism minor from Georgetown University, Rushil, for his capstone project, interviewed NFL players and agents to examine the post-career narratives of professional athletes. He has also served as a senior coordinator of Georgetown Rangila, the largest charity dance showcase in the United States with over 400 participants every year. Besides, he helped raise a record sum of $81,000 for a Nepali nonprofit to sponsor 300 years of girls’ education and to renovate a science lab and a school library. For his leadership skills, Rushil received the Martha Swanson Outstanding Senior Leader Award at Georgetown University.

Rushil’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is focusing on understanding the differences in economic access in Gujarat, one of the fastest growing states in India. The project is investigating the behavioral and institutional factors that shape economic inclusion across both urban and rural Gujarat. Through fieldwork in Delhi and Gujarat, Rushil aims to produce actionable insights that set the stage for the next leap in global financial access.

Sarah Khan

Sarah Khan graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where she majored in culture and politics with a concentration in race, caste, gender, and postcolonial development. Through her coursework, she deepened her understanding of the relationships among labor, capital, and the state with gender, desirability, and social mobility. Her senior thesis explored the construction of Muslim masculinities and femininities through techno-sex economies, wherein she analyzed the racialized nature of libidinal economies and offered a critique of Western liberal feminism. In addition to her academic work, Sarah is deeply passionate about teaching. She has served as an instructor for the Yale Young Global Scholars Program, a volunteer teacher for low-income youth in Washington, DC, through Georgetown University’s Center for Social Justice, and as an ESL instructor for newly resettled refugees in Atlanta through the International Rescue Committee.

As a recipient of the U.S. State Department’s critical language scholarship, Sarah studied the politics and poetics of her ancestral language, Urdu, in Lucknow during the summer of 2024. Most recently, she served as a fellow with the American India Foundation’s Banyan Impact Fellowship, working with the Hyderabad-based NGO Kriti Social Initiatives on the strategic implementation of economic empowerment initiatives for marginalized women.

Sarah’s Fulbright-Nehru project is using caste as an analytical framework to understand the lineage- and labor-based system of social stratification among Indian Muslims. To contextualize, conceptualize, and dismantle Ashraf (upper-caste) supremacy, her work is investigating how hyper endogamy functions as a mechanism through which caste rigidity is articulated, legitimized, and perpetuated. Through ethnographic research in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, Sarah is exploring how caste operates in and through class, educational background, and spatiality (urban/rural); she is also particularly focusing on the gendered dynamics of marriage and social mobility.

Hashwinder Singh

Mr. Hashwinder Singh is an aspiring scholar of post-Partition Indian political thought, with a particular focus on the relationship between Nehruvianism and Punjab’s Sikhs. Having recently graduated with a Master’s in Global History from the University of Oxford, and a bachelor‘s from Georgetown University, Mr. Singh is interested in how the state balances its ideological foundations when it pushes against minorities’ ability to engage with their most authentic representation of themselves. Outside of his academic passions, Mr. Singh spends his time reading, watching films and playing basketball.

Through his Fulbright-Nehru project, Mr. Singh seeks to understand the connectivity in discourse between three major periods of Sikh political agitation. Specifically, he is curious about the extent to which there was a coherence in the political rhetoric between Tara Singh (1945-46), Fateh Singh (1962-66) and Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (1980-84). He wants to understand the perceived shortcomings in Congress governance that led Akali Sikhs to believe that they were being neglected. Were Khalistani’s claims of Congress hegemony inherent to the Nehruvian project? Did Sikhs fulfill a social role akin to the Muslim subaltern in the post-Partition nation-state? In sum, Mr. Singh is probing what constitutes belonging within the Nehruvian nation-state.

Adam Shaham

Hailing from New York City, Mr. Mr. Adam Shaham graduated with a Bachelor in Science in International Culture and Politics from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in 2022. During his time at Georgetown, Mr. Shaham pursued his combined interests in public service and environmental stewardship in his work inside and outside of the classroom. His self-designed major focused on the intersection of international relations and climate change. Through the four-year Mortara Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Mr. Shaham conducted research on gender, education, and technology policy across the Middle East and was published in the International Journal of Education Development.

Off campus, Mr. Shaham completed internships at the U.S. Department of State and with Nancy Pelosi in the Office of the Speaker of the House. Mr. Shaham’s passion for environmental conservation also led him to volunteer more than 500 hours doing shore bank stabilization, invasive species removal, and fire clearance with AmeriCorps through Conservation Corps Minnesota and Iowa. Mr. Shaham was selected as a National Science Foundation REU intern at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS) in Fall of 2021. While at BIOS, Mr. Shaham developed a species distribution model for coral fish species threatened by invasive lionfish utilizing machine learning software. In his free time, Mr. Shaham loves to run, read bad mystery novels, and devour bagels.

Mangroves serve vital ecosystem functions, including shore stabilization and carbon sequestration. In the last decade, there have been hundreds of mangrove restoration programs globally yet most restorations have failed for lack of community buy-in. Through the Maharashtra Mangrove Cell, 120 km2 of Mumbai’s mangrove habitats have been restored. In order for these restorations to succeed long term, Mr. Shaham’s Fulbright-Nehru project will evaluate the socio-ecological role of Mumbai’s mangroves to identify effective community conservation strategies. Through interviews at restoration sites, this project aims to gauge community perceptions of mangrove forests. Utilizing Maharashtra State Archive records, this project aims to study historic perceptions of Mumbai’s mangroves.

Anya Wahal

Anya Wahal is a recent graduate of Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service where she majored in science, technology, and international affairs, and concentrated in energy and the environment. She is a Taiwanese-Indian-American researcher and activist dedicated to conserving the earth’s water resources and safeguarding the marginalized communities disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis. Beyond research, Anya has interned at the State Department, Census Bureau, Library of Congress, World Wildlife Fund, and Council on Foreign Relations.

During her time in college, Anya devoted herself to mentorship, research, and service. She was a meditation leader and first-year retreat leader, as well as a fellow at the Georgetown Women’s Alliance and a sister of the Delta Phi Epsilon professional foreign service sorority. Besides, she is a Carroll Fellow, Pelosi Scholar, and Krogh Scholar. Anya co-founded The Polling Place, a nonpartisan, youth-led nonprofit dedicated to providing information on elections nationwide, as well as of Pick It Up, an educational initiative on the Earth Challenge App that enables universities to track plastic waste. In her free time, Anya enjoys taking nature photographs, exploring new coffee shops, and visiting museums.

For her Fulbright-Nehru research project, in order to better understand how poor water quality is disproportionately impacting Indian mothers, Anya is conducting environmental anthropology and policy research in New Delhi, with the aim of answering the question: what is the relationship between the inclusion of low-income mothers in water quality policy and mothers’ lived experiences in New Delhi? Anya is combining semi-structured in-depth interviews with media analysis and participant observation to learn how mothers are discussed in relation to the water crisis; she is also investigating policies on water quality.

Eshan Gupta

Eshan Gupta is a recent graduate from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. He graduated with a BS in science, technology, and international affairs with an emphasis on energy and environmental issues. During his time at Georgetown University, he worked on clean-energy procurement for a private-sector consulting company and was also involved in various climate-related government initiatives in the legislative and executive branches. Eshan has extensive experience in international development, both on the funding and implementation sides. He is excited to begin the next chapter of his professional and academic journey with this Fulbright grant to India which he sees as a culmination of his academic and professional experiences thus far, allowing him to explore his research interests, while also expanding his knowledge about the fast-growing clean-energy field.

In his free time, Eshan enjoys singing, Bollywood dancing, and biking.

Eshan’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is working towards understanding why the current deployment of solar microgrids in rural India has not yielded the clean-energy and economic impacts that were promised. In order to study the several educational, social, and technological barriers to solar microgrid usage, Eshan is conducting interviews and policy analysis with various communities to understand how the government can better support rural deployment of solar microgrid to maximize usage; he is also examining the positive developmental and technological outcomes associated with solar power.

Martha Weiss

Prof. Martha Weiss is a professor of biology at Georgetown University where she directs the environmental biology major and co-directs the environmental studies program. She received a BA in geological sciences from Harvard University, a PhD in botany from the University of California, Berkeley, and postdoctoral training in insect behavior from the University of Arizona, Tucson. Her research – deriving from a close observation of nature – centers around experimental exploration of questions in insect ecology and plant–animal interactions. Her topics of investigation have included floral color changes as cues for pollinators; learning and memory in butterflies; the retention of memory across metamorphosis; and the indirect ecological consequences of periodical cicada emergences. In her teaching, she prioritizes opportunities for active learning and engagement; she believes that while thoughtful pedagogy is an important foundation for instruction in any subject, it is particularly critical in STEM fields where traditional, memorization-based methods of teaching have been known to discourage participation. Outside of research and teaching, she enjoys hiking and spending time outdoors, botanizing, foraging for edible plants, and working with fibers and textiles.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Weiss is investigating the behavior, movement, and sensory ecology of ant-mimicking arthropods in areas around Bengaluru and Thiruvananthapuram. In one of the prime examples of adaptation by natural selection, a diverse array of insects and spiders exhibit a remarkable resemblance to ants, mimicking them in both morphology and behavior, and thereby gaining protection from predators that actively avoid ants. She is also offering field-based workshops to students at Azim Premji University on plant–insect interactions; besides, she is participating in pedagogical workshops on “ungrading”, a relatively new assessment strategy that moves the focus away from testing and instead puts learning at the center of higher education.

Joseph Edmundson

Joseph Edmundson graduated from the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service in May 2022 with a BS in international economics with minors in mathematics and international development. His academic interests include rural and agrarian economic development with a focus on environmental, health, and economic externalities. Joseph’s first exposure to India was in December 2019 when he traveled to New Delhi on a two-week immersion trip to collect local experiences and perspectives on water utilization. Leaving the country with a profound desire to continue engaging with and working in India, he spent the remainder of his undergraduate years investigating rural Indian economic initiatives. This culminated in his honors thesis on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act’s theoretical impact on wage dynamics.

During his undergraduate years, he was also involved with nonprofit consulting. Following his graduation, Joseph spent two years with Goldman Sachs Public Global Banking and Markets Division in New York City.

In India, Joseph is excited to spend his free time continuing to develop his yoga practice as well as learn new culinary techniques, two of his favorite hobbies. Joseph also enjoys playing the tenor saxophone and piano, and is an avid art museum goer. Besides, he has performed as a dancer in Georgetown’s Rangila, an annual South Asian dance recital fundraiser.

In his Fulbright-Nehru project, Joseph is researching the implementation of two technology-based agrarian market interventions, the National Agriculture Market (eNAM) and AgMarknet; eNAM is a pan-India online trading platform for agricultural commodities with the goal of enabling large-scale market integration, while AgMarknet is an initiative to collect, analyze, and disseminate market information to agricultural market stakeholders. In his project, specifically, he is examining where these interventions have been successful and the kind of barriers they had faced; he is also studying the initiatives’ market efficiencies; besides, he is looking at the environmental and economic externalities brought about by these initiatives, including in terms of decision-making related to cropping practices and patterns over time.