University of Pennsylvania Archives

Sonali Deliwala

Ms. Sonali Deliwala graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in Spring 2022 with double majors in Political Science and Economics and a minor in Creative Writing. Ms. Deliwala has gained policy research experience through internships at numerous organizations, including the DC Congressional Office of Representative Pramila Jayapal, the Brookings Institution, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She been heavily involved in the Philly-based grassroots organization #VoteThatJawn, working as a Teaching Assistant (for the Academically Based Community Service Course “Writing and Politics,”) a Youth Leader, and a student reporter to get 18-year-olds registered to vote and first-time voters to the polls for the 2018 midterms and 2020 general election. Ms. Deliwala has held various positions in political science and economic research, a Spring 2021 Fellow for Penn’s Program on Public Opinion Research & Election Studies (PORES), a Summer 2021 Fox Fellowship at Brookings, and serving as a research assistant for multiple Penn faculty. She was also awarded the 2019 Terry B. Heled Travel & Research Grant to document the lives of an Adivasi community in her family’s hometown in India as well as the 2020-2021 U.S. Department of Education’s Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship. Ms. Deliwala is interested in studying rural economic development in South Asia.

Under the Fulbright-Nehru Student Research program, Ms. Deliwala is carrying out the project in the Narmada district of Gujarat, which is heavily populated by Adivasis, primarily the Gujarati-speaking Tavdi and Vasava tribes. This project will ultimately provide a critical case study of how Adivasis in India have been economically impacted by gaining land rights and offer insights into a path of sustainable development for the community.

Sriram Palepu

Sriram Palepu is a medical student with an interest in identifying and addressing healthcare disparities in South Asia. He completed his undergraduate studies from The University of Texas at Austin where he studied the heavy-metal contamination of the Godavari River. He is now a student of the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. He has specific interests in HIV dermatology, gender-affirming care, and environmental health, and hopes to work in India throughout his career.

Sriram is pursuing his Fulbright-Nehru research at Mitr Clinic in Hyderabad in order to understand: the social and health history of trans, or hijra, communities in Hyderabad in terms of substance use and mental health; the extent to which trans individuals are currently satisfied with their external gender presentation; and the attitudes toward the importance of and accessibility of bodily and facial aesthetic procedures in affirming gender identity.

Priyamvada Nambrath

Priya Nambrath is a doctoral candidate in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation research focuses on the applied practice of mathematics and astronomy in the sociocultural life of medieval and pre-modern Kerala. More broadly, she is interested in the intellectual and scientific history of India with a focus on cultural encounters, archaic modernisms, patronage, and pedagogy. Language and literature, textual culture, and visual art constitute additional related areas of her focus. She is also interested in folk traditions of art and knowledge in South India, and the ocean-facing histories of the region.

Priya brings her previous training and work experience in science and mathematics to her current research interests in Indian scientific and educational history. She has taught university courses in Sanskrit and Malayalam language and literature and has published a translation of a Sanskrit play. She has also been a highly successful coach for competitive mathematics at the school level.

Under the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Priya is researching the pedagogical approaches and cultural concerns that shaped the mathematical culture of South India in the pre-colonial and early colonial periods, with a focus on the Kerala school of Indian mathematics. She is conducting archival research on untranslated mathematical materials composed both in Sanskrit and in the vernacular languages. Priya hopes that her research will contribute to increasing awareness about a plurality of scientific traditions and pedagogical strategies which can be profitably utilized in modern classrooms.

Vincent Kelley

Vincent Kelley is a PhD candidate in music studies at the University of Pennsylvania with interests in South Asian music, global jazz, social theory, music and religion, and the history of ethnomusicology. He received a BA in religious studies from Grinnell College in 2016 and an MMus in musicology and ethnomusicology from King’s College London in 2019. Vincent wrote his master’s thesis on the historical, aesthetic, and social relationships among the tabla, naqqara, and kathak performers in North India, which he is currently revising for publication. He has performed on drum set and tabla in jazz, Hindustani, and popular music settings in the United States and India. Vincent is also interested in Hindi, Urdu, and Persian languages and literature, and has received the American Institute of Indian Studies fellowship to study Urdu and the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship to study Persian. Vincent’s PhD research focuses on the political economy and aesthetics of jazz, Hindustani music, and Indo-jazz fusion in the late-twentieth century.

Vincent’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating jazz in post-Independence India through the lens of the Jazz Yatra music festivals held in Mumbai and Delhi from 1978 to 2003. The Jazz Yatra promoted the interaction between Indian classical music and jazz, and became the longest-running jazz festival in the world outside of the United States and Europe. For the project, Vincent is employing oral historical, ethnographic, and archival research methodologies to understand how pivotal economic, political, and cultural transitions in late-twentieth century India and the United States were influenced by and through the Jazz Yatra festival.

Chandni Shah

Chandni Shah graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and minors in chemistry and healthcare management. After graduation, she worked as a clinical research coordinator at Penn Medicine, where she studied and helped carry out a novel social-functioning program for adults on the autism spectrum. She focused on developing methods of outreach to diverse groups in the autism community in the hope of increasing access and equity in autism research. Chandni also has experience conducting insomnia and mindfulness research; her study was accepted for poster presentation at the 2022 Associated Professional Sleep Societies Conference and its abstract has been published in SLEEP. Research has been at the core of her academic career thus far. In fact, Chandni has been able to work on seven studies and move toward the publication of four papers (of which she is the primary author of three). She hopes to leverage clinical research to make significant positive changes in the medical field. Her hobbies include dancing, playing the violin and clarinet, and writing slam poetry.

Research studies have shown that in India, there is a significant delay between the first recognition of symptoms to the actual initiation of treatment for autism spectrum disorder (ASD); this is detrimental to the development of a child on the autism spectrum. Although scientific literature reveals these delays exist, there is little research exploring the causes behind such delays. Chandni’s Fulbright-Nehru project, while filling these research gaps, is identifying the barriers that prevent families from receiving early ASD diagnoses and interventions. She is also investigating the mental well-being of the caregivers of children on the autism spectrum.

Carlin Romano

Prof. Carlin Romano teaches media theory and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of America the Philosophical (Alfred A. Knopf/Vintage), described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as “Massive, impressive and indispensable…perhaps the best history of American philosophy of the past half-century”, and by National Public Radio as “dauntingly brilliant”. He is also the editor and contributor to Philadelphia Noir, a collection of original short stories in the highly praised Akashic Noir series.

As a journalist, literary critic, and public intellectual, Prof. Romano has held many prominent positions, including being the president of the National Book Critics Circle, literary editor and literary critic for 25 years for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and critic-at-large for several reputed publications. His criticism has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Nation, the Wall Street Journal, the American Scholar, and the Village Voice. Prof. Romano has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Peking University’s Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, the First Foreign Philosophy Visiting Fellow at Fudan University, a Fulbright Scholar to Germany and Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Criticism, who was cited by the Pulitzer Board for “bringing new vitality to the classic essay across a formidable array of topics”.

As a philosopher, Prof. Romano has taught at prestigious institutions like Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and St. Petersburg State University. He is the author of the main article, “East Asian Philosophy of Religion”, in the International Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion and of an article on Umberto Eco in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.

As a pragmatism scholar, Prof. Romano is writing a book entitled Over There: The Internationalization of American Philosophy. Through the Fulbright-Nehru project, the book is extending its territory to India. Prof. Romano is also studying how Bhimrao Ambedkar, John Dewey’s most influential Indian student, shaped Indian law and politics. Besides, he is probing and analyzing modern Indian philosophy, cinema, literature, TV, and journalism to identify pragmatist elements and resonances.

Sanjeev Chawla

Dr. Sanjeev Chawla is a research assistant professor in the Department of Radiology, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. He is also a medical physicist certified by the American Board of Medical Physics. The focus of Dr. Chawla’s research has been directed toward the development of metabolic and physiological MR imaging-derived biomarkers in making correct diagnosis and assessing treatment responses to established, novel, and emerging therapies in patients with brain tumor, head and neck cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases.

He has a master’s degree in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and a PhD in radiology from Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow. He has authored 103 peer-reviewed original research/review articles and eight book chapters. He has been awarded research grants by agencies like the National Institute of Health/National Cancer Institute, the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, and the Penn Center for Precision Medicine. Currently, he is leading two clinical trials related to electric field therapy in glioblastomas (NCT05086497) and evaluation of treatment response in the case of salivary gland tumors (NCT04452162).

Dr. Chawla is also an associate editor with the Journal of Translational Medicine and a reviewer for several leading scientific journals. Earlier, he was a guest editor with Frontiers in Neurology. He has also won the Outstanding Researcher Award in Neuroradiology from the Venus International Foundation and the Leadership and Mentorship Scholarship Award from the National Cancer Institute Awardee Skill Development Consortia.

Dr. Chawla’s Fulbright-Nehru project is building a robust, reproducible, and objective clinical decision support (CDS) tool by incorporating physiologic and metabolic MR imaging-derived parameters and molecular signatures combined with machine learning algorithms for assessing treatment response in glioblastoma patients receiving standard treatment as well as novel therapies. This tool will not only facilitate accurate and timely differentiation of true progression and pseudo progression in glioblastomas (precision diagnostics) but also allow clinicians to make “go/stop” decisions on therapeutic interventions (precision therapeutics). Additionally, it will help to relieve “scanxiety” among patients and their loved ones.