Home Institution USA: William & Mary

Aditi Mishra

Aditi Mishra is a recent graduate of the College of William & Mary, where she earned a BA in sociology with a concentration in health, medicine, and well-being, and a minor in biochemistry. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of global health, health policy, and clinical medicine, with research spanning maternal healthcare systems, community health worker infrastructure, and the historical development of public health in South Asia.

As a Monroe Scholar, Aditi conducted an undergraduate research examining why maternal mortality rates vary across geographic regions in Nepal and how community health worker-centered interventions can address structural disparities in primary and maternal care access. Her research combined quantitative spatial analysis with qualitative fieldwork, and was supported by multiple Charles Center research grants, the Tyler Center for Global Studies, and the Schroeder Center for Health Policy.

On campus, Aditi served as a resident assistant, vice president of Women in STEM, and was an active member of Minorities in Medicine and the Library Ambassadors program. She is also an alumna of the U.S. Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship, through which she studied Hindi intensively in Jaipur, India, and has since developed intermediate proficiency in the language.

Aditi’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is tracing the development of public health infrastructure in North India’s National Capital Region, examining how communities understand, adapt to, and respond to climate-related health risks, including heat-related illness, cardiovascular stress, and waterborne disease. Drawing on colonial-era medical archives alongside semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observations, her project is exploring how vaccination campaigns, child nutrition programs, and air quality policy have evolved across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and how cultural norms, gender, and economic factors shape community health adaptation practices today. Her research is also examining how historical institutional legacies and community perspectives can together inform more equitable and culturally resonant public health systems.

Aleksandr Kuzmenchuk

Alek Kuzmenchuk is a recent graduate of William & Mary, where he studied international relations and data science. He graduated summa cum laude and as a member of the oldest honor society in the United States, Phi Beta Kappa. His mother was born in Vadodara, India, and his father in Belarus. He is passionate about international affairs and public service and has completed internships at the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Global Research Institute, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and geoLab. He was also the editor-in-chief of William & Mary’s journal of international studies, The Monitor. As part of the Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship program, Alek spent the summer of 2023 studying Hindi in Jaipur. His research interests include Indian politics, Eastern European civic space, nuclear diplomacy, political behavior, and the role of ideology in international relations. In college, he was also a member and captain of the Division I gymnastics team. His recognitions include the NCAA Elite 90 Award, the Omicron Delta Kappa National Leader of the Year Award, the William & Mary Cypher Award, and the William & Mary Peel Hawthorne Award.

In his Fulbright-Nehru project, Alek is analyzing the records of India’s second president, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, to gain an understanding of India’s civilizational ethos through the lenses of political philosophy and religious ethics. Dr. Radhakrishnan’s body of work combines insights about the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism and its application to state building. Using that understanding, Alek, while working with researchers in the Department of International Relations at Ashoka University, is conducting conversational interviews with New Delhi residents and those from the surrounding area, as well as with those working in government, to understand how these insights are reflected in modern India.