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Mohammed Roshan Cheerakolil Konath

Dr. Mohammed Roshan C.K. completed his Ph.D. from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai in 2021. He completed his master’s and bachelor’s in sociology from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and the University of Calicut, Malappuram, Kerala respectively. In his Ph.D. dissertation, he explored the techniques of cultivating affective bonding with the Prophet Muhammed and the devotional world these bonds create among the Mappila Muslims of Kerala, South India.

Dr. Roshan has published in renowned academic and non-academic journals. He has presented at numerous national and international conferences. His area of interest revolves around the sociology of religion, technology, globalization and local cultures, affect studies, intellectual history of Islam, anthropology of Islam, and Islam and Muslims in South Asia.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship, Dr. Roshan is looking at a recent phenomenon among Mappila Muslims of South India whereby they look toward North American Muslim scholars to form an opinion on Islamic matters and shape their everyday life. The foundational assumption in this study is that this new tendency needs to be located in the ongoing surge of neo-traditional Islam in different parts of the world. The study compares neo-traditional Islam’s characters, structures, mode of knowledge production, global networking, and authorities in North America and South India, and analyzes the shared characteristics and ruptures between traditional Islam in both contexts. Dr. Roshan’s study enquires how these complex trans-local realities, mediated through the means and structure of globalization, call to reimagine the conventional boundaries between Islam and the West.

Ansuman Halder

Dr. Ansuman Halder obtained his B.Sc. degree from Scottish Church College, University of Calcutta, in 2011 and then joined the M.Sc.-Ph.D. dual degree program at the Department of Energy Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, Mumbai. He pursued his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Shaibal K. Sarkar and received his dual degree in 2020. His research work was focused on understanding the structural and opto-electronic properties of various hybrid halide perovskite materials for photovoltaic applications.

Besides publishing several research articles in reputed international journals, Dr. Halder filed a patent for development of perovskite based thermochromic photovoltaic devices during his Ph.D. He was awarded the prestigious Bhaskara Advanced Solar Energy (BASE) fellowship in 2017 for a 3 month internship at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Colorado. After finishing his Ph.D., Dr. Halder joined Bar-Ilan University, Israel in 2020 as a postdoctoral fellow and worked with Prof. David Cahen to understand the electrical and electronic properties of hybrid perovskite materials.

Use of solar power for energy generation is highly advantageous as it is abundant and pollution free. In recent times, perovskite based solar cells have emerged as one of the most promising technologies to provide solar generated electricity at lower costs. During his Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship, Dr. Halder is focusing on understanding the growth dynamics of the large-scale perovskite thin film formation that is essential for development of perovskite based solar cell technology.

Sujoy Ghosh

Dr. Sujoy Kumar Ghosh is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at Laboratorio NEST, Istituto Nanoscienze-CNR, Pisa, Italy. Previously, he was Post doctoral Research Associate at UNIST, South Korea. Dr. Ghosh completed his Ph.D. in 2019, M.Sc. in 2012, and B.Sc. in 2010 from the Department of Physics, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

Dr. Ghosh has published 45 scientific articles in peer reviewed journals, several book chapters, and he possesses h-index of 29 (Google scholar). He has won several awards and recognitions, such as Young Scientist Award in “International Virtual Conference on Advances in Functional Materials (AFM 2020)”, Newton Bhabha Fellow (2017), Best Poster Award in “Fourth International Symposium on Semiconductor Materials and Devices (ISSMD-4)” (2017), DST Award for 66th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, Germany (2016) among others. The design and experimental study on piezo-, pyro- and ferro-electric properties of synthetic and natural polymers as well as investigation of their resulting energy harvesting device towards the applications of self-powered healthcare monitoring are leitmotifs of his research.

In recent years, the integration between medicine and technology qualitatively extended new designs of implantable biomedical devices (IBDs), allowing competitive advantage for medical treatment of human body. However, nearly all classes of active IBDs rely on battery powers, which not only have limited lifespan, but also increase patient’s health risks and expanses. During his Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship, Dr. Ghosh is designing ultrasonic waves stimulated piezo-electrically-powered miniature wireless IBDs using biodegradable natural polymer materials in a non-invasive approach.

Sourav Kumar

Mr. Sourav Kumar is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam. His doctoral research focuses on the evaluation of earthquake-induced changes in groundwater composition, commonly known as hydro-geochemical earthquake precursors (associated with the slow accumulation of tectonic stress in the Earth’s crust) in northeast India.

Mr. Kumar obtained his bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering at Uttarakhand Technical University, Dehradun, in 2016. He completed his master’s degree in Earth System Science and Engineering under the Department of Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam, in 2018. He received the MHRD-GATE Fellowship for two years of his M.Tech. in 2016, where he studied the spatio-temporal variability in India’s groundwater storage using GRACE data. As his research expanded and segued into his doctoral research, he has presented his work at international conferences in 2019 and 2021.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, his primary objective is to understand the links between earthquakes and hydrological/hydro-geochemical variation that could be used as basic scientific input required for an impending earthquake prediction at both national and international levels. The proposed study could be used to correlate datasets from northeast India with those from other parts of the world such as Iceland, Japan, Korea, Italy, China, and the United States, that have reported similar earthquake-induced changes in groundwater composition.

In addition to his academic engagements, he also led the cricket team of IIT Guwahati at the ‘All-India Inter-IIT Sports Meet’ during 2017-19 and held several student representative posts at the institutional level throughout his college years.

Vaishali Thakkur

Ms. Vaishali Thakkur is a Ph.D. scholar at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK), Uttar Pradesh. Her research focuses on modelling enzymatic reactions using density functional based on the quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) technique. As a part of her doctoral thesis, she works with the QM/MM method, along with various enhanced sampling techniques, to study the underlying mechanism for antibiotic resistance. She is also interested in identifying and addressing the bottleneck in these calculations to make them more efficient. Apart from science, she enjoys spending her time learning new languages and playing with her color palette.

Prior to joining IITK as a research scholar, she completed her bachelor’s and master’s in Chemistry from Delhi University and Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD), respectively. She has been a recipient of the merit cum means scholarship for her performance at IITD. She also has a year-long experience of working as an online educator and content reviewer at Chegg India Pvt. Ltd.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, she will work with experts to understand and implement a new electrostatic embedding scheme in the existing QM/MM framework. The aim is to develop a model that is accurate and affordable at the same time. The introduction of such a method would be beneficial for people modelling reactions in complex biological systems, where the computation of these electrostatic interactions proves to be time consuming.

Manashita Borah

Dr. Manashita Borah, is as an Assistant Professor (Senior Grade) in the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE), Tezpur University, Assam, India since 2016. She obtained her PhD from Department of EE, NIT Silchar. Dr Borah is the recipient of the Young Scientist Award, conferred by DST, Government of Assam in the State Awards Ceremony for Scientific Excellence in 2019, the Young Engineer’s Award by Senior Engineers Forum, Institution of Engineers in 2018 and two IEEE best paper awards. Additionally, she also received the Distinguished Anundoram Borooah Merit Award from the Government of Assam and Oil India Limited.

Dr Borah leads the Control System Design and Simulation Laboratory in the Department of EE at Tezpur University, where her research group is focusing on designing fractional-order controllers, IoT enabled renewable energy systems, among others.

Her Fulbright-Kalam project aims to address two open problems faced globally: shortcomings of existing energy infrastructure and climate sustainable energy storage by capitalizing on green energy sources. She will be working on designing a smart hybrid storage system to deliver an improved, sustainable, resilient, safe, and efficient green energy storage infrastructure. It will address the serious implications of climate change faced in her home state of Assam, such as heavy floods due to the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, soil erosion and landslides that cause power outage for several days.

Apart from being conferred with prestigious awards and having publications in reputed journals, she has been actively associated with various departmental, academic and co-curricular activities of the university, such as dance, drama, and yoga. She has been trained in the Indian classical dance forms of Bharatnatyam and Shattriya for twelve years.

Shivani Sharma

Dr. Shivani Sharma received her BSc (Honors) from Gargi College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, in 2013. After that, she joined the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune (IISER-Pune), for an Integrated MS-PhD program. After completing her MS in 2015, she joined the research group of Prof. Sujit K Ghosh to pursue her doctoral studies. Her work was focused on the design and synthesis of neutral nitrogen donor linker-based metal-organic frameworks with a focus on sequestration and sensing of toxic pollutants. She has published several research articles in reputable international journals. She qualified for the IIT-JAM examination and was awarded the CSIR-SRF research Fellow ship. Her other recognitions include the Best Poster Award at a conference hosted by RSC Porous Materials Group, UK .

She is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Dr. Alexander C Forse at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, UK. Her work is focused on the design of novel sorbents for carbon capture.

For her Fulbright-Nehru postdoctoral stint, Dr. Shivani will be working in the research group of Prof. Jeffrey R Long at the University of California, Berkeley, CA. Her project aims to develop new porous materials for the capture of highly toxic ions and the extraction of trace/precious metal ions from various waste/seawater by electrochemical methods. She is passionate about achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, including freshwater security and sustainable development.

Sanyogita Chadha

Dr. Sanyogita Chadha is a Professor of Fashion Design and the Regional Director at Pearl Academy, Bengaluru, Karnataka. She has a PhD in Anthropometry and has over three decades of experience in the fashion industry and academia. Dr. Chadha has held leadership positions at Karnavati University, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, and at the Gurukul School of Design, Jaipur, Rajasthan. She is a Board Member of Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, Gujarat, and she is on the Advisory Board at STYLUMIA, an Artificial Intelligence Company that offers analytics solutions for the fashion industry. She has been a jury member for PhD candidates at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, a federal public institute established in 2006.

Home Institution: Pearl Academy is an autonomous institution in the field of creative education with schools of design, fashion, contemporary media, and creative practice. With campuses in Delhi, Jaipur, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, the institution has received awards and recognition for design education from business organizations and the media. There are currently over 3,000 students enrolled across its four campuses.

Sadhana Naithani

Dr. Sadhana Naithani is a Professor at the Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. She is the Coordinator of the Folklore Unit at JNU, an Honorary Fellow of the American Folklore Society, and the current President of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research.

She did her Ph.D. in the field of German Folkloristics. She has been interested in the transformation of the concept of folklore in different historical contexts-under British colonialism, in Germany after World War II, and in the Baltic countries under Soviet occupation. She is the author of In Quest of Indian Folktales (Indiana University Press, 2006), The Story Time of the British Empire (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), Folklore Theory in Post-war Germany (University Press of Mississippi, 2014) and Folklore in Baltic History, Resistance and Resurgence (University Press of Mississippi, 2019). Her novella: Elephantine (Red Squirrel Press, 2016) is based on her research in colonial forestry led by German scientists in British India. She is on the editorial boards of journals Marvels and Tales, Cultural Analysis, and Journal of the School of Languages.

Dr. Naithani is deeply interested in the relationship of human and non-human beings experienced in cultural-political contexts and expressed in narratives. As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar at University of California, Berkeley, she will explore the narratives of British colonizers about the wild non-human animals of the colonies. She will teach a graduate course in the Fall Semester and an undergraduate course in the Spring Semester around her research theme.

Sushanta Kumar Chatterjee

Presently Chief (Regulatory Affairs) with Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC), Dr. Sushanta Kumar Chatterjee has a long experience in dealing with power sector reforms, especially, Regulatory Reforms since its inception in 1998.

He has been a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, USA, and holds a Ph.D. in Management, MBA in Finance and Master’s in Economics.

He has co-authored “The Electricity Sector in India: Policy and Regulation” (Oxford University Press, 2012); authored “S.K. Chatterjee’s Commentary on the Electricity Laws of India” (Delhi Law House, 2006); published papers on renewable energy policy (World Bank 2013; NREL 2016; Energy Policy 2021); completed research as Principal Investigator (Topic: “Meeting the Renewable Revolution: A Roadmap for Electricity Market Design in India”) at International Growth Centre, London School of Economics, UK (2017); co-authored “Renewable Energy in India: Economics and Market Dynamics” (Sage Publishing, India, 2021).

Public policy has been his passion in professional and academic life. He has demonstrated a leadership role in conceiving, designing, and implementing policy and regulation, especially on renewable and electricity market design in India. He has played a pioneering role in introducing the Electricity Act, 2003; Renewable Energy Certificate mechanism; Security Constrained Economic Dispatch; Real Time Market; market based Ancillary Services.

He has been/is a part of several Committees constituted by Ministry of Power, CERC, Forum of Regulators, and South Asia Forum for Infrastructure Regulation. He is a regular guest faculty in several institutions in India/abroad. Dr. Chatterjee has been nominated as the first President of Indian Association of Energy Economics.