Georgia State University Archives

Puja Raol is a neuroscience student in the Honors College at Georgia State University, where she graduated summa cum laude with minors in health policy and sociology. She aspires to become a physician who makes community-health interventions through direct clinical care for underserved populations. As a presidential scholar, Puja has demonstrated exceptional academic achievement with sustained commitment to leadership, research, and community service. She recently received the Nell Hamilton Trotter Award, the highest student leadership honor at Georgia State University.
Puja’s clinical and community engagement centers on improving healthcare access for underserved populations. As an executive member at Shifa Clinic, a nonprofit serving refugees and uninsured patients, she has led initiatives to expand preventive care, including coordinating six mobile mammogram programs in partnership with Northside Hospital.

Apart from Georgia State University, she has had research experience at Harvard Medical School and the Emory University School of Medicine. She is a recipient of the Gilman Scholarship and several first-place research awards. Her interests lie at the intersection of neuroscience, public health, and health equity, with a focus on addressing mental health disparities in marginalized populations.

Since research in low- and middle-income countries accords priority to physical health, adolescent mental health in rural areas remains understudied, particularly in terms of affordable interventions. Puja’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining adolescent mental well-being in rural low-income areas of India, focusing on scalable, low-cost mental health interventions. The research, being conducted in Jagadhia, Gujarat, in partnership with IIPG and SEWA Rural (a voluntary development organization), is leveraging local surveyors and community alliances. It is mainly assessing and implementing community-centered strategies, aiming to develop replicable, cross-cultural models that can reduce mental health disparities in India and similar global settings.

Sarah Jacob is a public policy researcher whose work has involved labor, migration, gendered violence, and public economics. She recently graduated from Georgia State University with a master’s in public policy. While attending graduate school, she served as a graduate research assistant and learned hard and soft skills pertaining to community needs assessments and qualitative and quantitative program evaluation. She earned her undergraduate degree from Brandeis University, where she studied economics, with minors in philosophy and legal studies. Her academic background has shaped her commitment to equity-driven research and marginalized communities.

Professionally, Sarah has worked across multiple U.S. states as a community organizer, labor advocate, and social service provider. She worked for the Georgia House minority leader as a policy assistant in 2026, flagging harmful legislation and conducting public policy research to guide legislative decision-making. In Chicago during 2022–2024, she built and led a home energy campaign in Rogers Park, during which she developed relationships with diverse communities through street-level engagement and also provided domestic violence prevention training to Asian communities.

Beyond her academic and professional pursuits, Sarah is an avid reader, a lover of history, and an active participant in community organizing. Her lived experiences across many U.S. cities, combined with her deep personal ties to India, shape her interest in fostering cross-cultural dialogue, public scholarship, and long-term engagement with global labor issues.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Sarah is studying labor welfare in the gig economy of Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, where she is examining how India’s shift toward market-driven growth has reshaped work structures. Through an affiliation with the Centre for Development Studies (CDS), she is conducting semi-structured interviews with platform workers, managers, and stakeholders, supported by a Malayalam-speaking research assistant. Her research is integrating qualitative fieldwork with existing CDS data to analyze issues such as worker security, dignity, and “decent work” conditions. The project aims to contribute to global labor policy conversations and strengthen academic exchanges between the U.S. and India.