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Sarthak Arora

Mr. Sarthak Arora is a researcher based in Delhi, working at the intersection of environment and machine learning. His research looks at river remediation, wildfire risk-prediction, biodiversity monitoring, and remote sensing. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Statistics from Ramjas College, Delhi University, and a PG Diploma in Machine Learning from Plaksha University.

Having worked with corporations such as Nearbuy, Paytm, Disney+ Hotstar, and Indifi as a Data Analyst/Scientist in the past, Sarthak pivoted to academia to pursue interdisciplinary research with universities and non-profits. As a part of Collaborative Earth’s Ganges Lab, led by Dr. Anthony Acciavatti, he has been engaged in developing a comprehensive River Remediation strategy for the Ganges River. At Wuuii Inc, he designed computer vision architectures using multi-modal earth observation datasets to improve wildfire risk assessments.

Sarthak is pursuing a master’s program in environmental studies to further engage with spatio-temporal ecological systems, especially how they are impacted by climate variability. After that, he plans to undertake projects which will focus on designing scalable, resource-efficient modelling approaches for active environmental challenges in the Global South. As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Sarthak is aiming to integrate data-driven insights with environmental justice and policymaking to help guide global conservation practices. The scope and scale of interdisciplinary research needed to address the complexities of environmental resilience requires access to global networks, which he is eager to leverage during the fellowship period.

Raju Manjali Rhee Johnson

Dr. Raju Manjali Rhee Johnson is an award-winning pharmaceutical physician and med-tech innovator, currently leading the Kerala Genome Data Centre, a flagship genomics program under the Kerala Development and Innovation Strategic Council. His work focuses on leveraging genomics and digital health to enable population-scale public health transformation and economic development.

Dr. Raju began his career in pharmaceutical medical affairs before moving into strategy and leadership roles across digital health and med-tech. He has held key positions at Wolters Kluwer, supporting clinical decision systems across South Asia. He also served at Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, where he worked on advancing digital therapeutics and medical technologies. Dr. Rhee actively mentors and advises incubators, accelerators, and over 50 startups in healthcare and technology.

Beyond healthcare, Dr. Raju is a storyteller and creative practitioner. He has hosted a solo photography exhibition at Mumbai’s Jehangir Art Gallery. A sought-after speaker, he has delivered talks at more than 500 scientific forums and has also been featured at prominent literary platforms such as the Kerala Literature Festival, Global
AI Summit and other major management and tech conferences. He has authored multiple articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and contributed to national newspapers, shaping conversations at the intersection of healthcare, technology, and public policy.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow at Harvard University, Dr. Raju is pursuing a master’s in public health. His goal is to integrate med-tech innovation, genomics, and policy to design scalable, equitable public health solutions for India and other emerging economies.

Pratiksha Sanjay Basarkar

Ms. Pratiksha S. Basarkar graduated with a BA LLB (Hons) from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore in 2018, where she was awarded the Heyning-Roelli Foundation Scholarship to attend a semester at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Since graduation, Pratiksha has worked as a litigation lawyer across roles. She began her career at a major law firm before joining Project 39A (now The Square Circle Clinic, NALSAR University of Law), a criminal justice organization. Here she led teams providing pro bono legal representation to persons sentenced to death before the Supreme Court of India and various High Courts, contributing to several acquittals and commutations of sentences. She has facilitated mitigation investigations and worked on strategic litigation addressing broader issues in the criminal justice system, such as unreliable forensic evidence and mental healthcare in prisons. Beyond litigation, she has written on new criminal laws and engaged with stakeholders including social workers and policy researchers through training and discussions.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Pratiksha is pursuing an LLM at Harvard Law School. She is studying comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to criminal law and systemic reform, with a focus on wrongful convictions, to inform litigation and reform efforts in India.

Nirmala Menon

Prof. Nirmala Menon is a Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), IIT Indore, and leads the Digital Humanities and Publishing Research Group. Prof Menon is the Chair of J. P. Narayan National Centre of Excellence in the Humanities at IIT Indore and is an affiliate Research Professor with the University of Oxford. She is the author of four books with the latest Practices of Digital Humanities in India: Learning by Doing (Routledge, 2024). She is also the co-editor of the first multilingual volume of e-literature published from India (2024). Prof. Menon has received various national and international grants and awards (MHRD, SPARC, UKEIRI, and Academia Europaea among others). She has also hosted Fulbright Scholars in her lab and along with her students, received international awards such as Charles Wallace Fellowship, Zubaan Sasakawa Publishing prize and ASEM-DUO fellowship.

During her Fulbright Research Fellowship, Prof. Menon will be working on a book project that explores the challenges and possibilities of developing a multilingual scholarly publishing ecosystem. The book examines the infrastructural, economic and intellectual challenges of developing a robust scholarly publishing set-up in the coming years. New technologies along with the rapid advancement of AI tools will shape the direction and policies of scholarly communication in the coming years and this book looks at issues of language and access within that discourse. Prof. Menon will also be working with Prof. Julia Flanders on the DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly Journal and contribute to and learn from its best practices.

Shreyashi Ray

Ms. Shreyashi Ray is a lawyer and policy professional with experience in health, disability, and queer rights. As part of her work at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, Delhi between 2021 and 2025, she has advised union and state governments on legal frameworks for public health emergencies, disability inclusion, and the right to health in India. She has also worked with CSOs and the medical community to recommend policies prioritizing ethical end-of-life care and queer-affirmative healthcare.

Prior to this, she worked with the District Administration of Ranchi from 2018 to 2020 to implement critical health initiatives in under-served areas. During the COVID-19 epidemic, she devised the district’s health and welfare plan with the district machinery and civil society, and established helplines for mental health, domestic violence, and migrant support.

Shreyashi graduated from The WB National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata with a BA, LLB (Hons.) degree in 2016, after which she worked at the National Law University, Delhi till 2018 on the first comprehensive open science report in India.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Shreyashi is studying public health with a focus on health policy and aims to implement rights-based health policies in India that build a culture incentivizing inclusion and sharing of relevant, authentic data. Through this, she hopes to make the public health system in India more transparent, collaborative, inclusive of marginalized communities, and responsive to social needs.

Jaya Mathur

Ms. Jaya Mathur is a PhD Candidate at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She holds an MA in sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University and a BA in philosophy from Hindu College, University of Delhi. Her research interests include ethnographic and historical studies of evidentiality and truth-making practices in medicine, cultures of expertise, practices of the body and quantification, patient-centeredness, global pharmaceutical trajectories, medical technologies, and contested disease categories.

She has worked as a researcher with public health and health policy projects examining urban women’s experiences with assisted reproduction, social inequality and access to medicinal substances among Adivasi communities in central India, and the role of unqualified medical practitioners in rural healthcare. As an associate researcher at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, Jaya studied how technologies and practices of digital health re-configured forms of medical and psychological expertise.

For her PhD, Jaya explores how non-cancer chronic pain is constituted as a diagnostic and therapeutic category in biomedicine amidst conditions of epistemic and ontological uncertainty. To this end, she documents the translational, ethical and relational thinking as well as labor undertaken by medical experts in collaboration with their patients.

During the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowship, Jaya is affiliated to the Department of Sociology at Boston University, working with Prof. Jane Pryma. She is expanding her research on the varying strains of expertise mobilized around chronic pain, and the medicalization of pain in India and the U.S.

Ankit Banik

Mr. Ankit Banik is a PhD candidate at the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Maharashtra. His doctoral research focuses on the development of novel and efficacious chimeric antigen receptor natural killer (CAR-NK) cell therapies, where he aims to harness the power of natural killer cells, a crucial component of the innate immune system, to target and eliminate cancer cells more effectively. His work aims to optimize the engineering of NK cells, enhancing their tumor-targeting capabilities and improving their overall therapeutic potential. His research strives to pave the way for innovative, personalized, and safer cancer treatments by advancing CAR-NK cell therapies.

Ankit completed his BSc in microbiology at University of Kalyani, acquiring a strong foundation in molecular biology, immunology, and cellular biology. Pursuing MSc in biotechnology at Pondicherry University, he honed his expertise in advanced laboratory techniques, genetic engineering, and cellular manipulation. Then as a project intern, he gained valuable research experience at the renowned Bose Institute.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ankit is exploring the potential of CAR-NK cell therapy that is more effective in targeting and treating solid tumors, overcoming the challenges posed by the tumor microenvironment and improving the therapeutic outcomes for patients. Ankit is committed to translating his findings into clinical applications that will benefit patients, and passionate about bridging the gap between laboratory research and real-world cancer therapies.

Ankit loves travelling and enjoys trekking and hiking. He has a strong appreciation of music and dance as well.

Nutanben Himmatlal Bhingaradiya

Dr. Nutanben Himmatlal Bhingaradiya is JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Graduate school of Medicine, Dentistry and Pharmaceutical Science, Okayama University, Okayama, where she is mentored by Prof. Takuya Matsumoto. Dr. Bhingaradiya earned her master’s degree in pharmaceutics in 2015. In 2021, she received her Ph.D. in chemical sciences from the CSIR Central Salt and Marine Chemical Research Institute, Bhavnagar, Gujarat. Her doctoral thesis was supported by a CSIR GATE JRF fellowship and explored the topic of “Synthesis of Biodegradable Amphiphilic Copolymers and Conetworks by Sequential Nucleophilic Substitution”.. After her Ph.D., she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai under the supervision of Prof. Rohit Srivastava and late Prof. Rinti Banerjee.

During her Ph.D., Dr. Bhingaradiya published several research articles, book chapters, reviews, and patents, garnering 292 citations and an h-index of seven. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the FY2022 JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship for Research in Japan (Standard); Institute Post-Doctoral Fellowships from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai; CSIR Senior Research Fellowship (SRF) – GATE, HRDG-CSIR, Government of India; CSIR Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) – GATE, HRDG-CSIR, Govternment of India;, AICTE Post Graduate (PG- GATE/GPAT) Scholarship, AICTE India.

During her Fulbright_Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship, Dr. Bhingaradiya is undertaking an interdisciplinary project that employs a number of novel and innovative techniques, which are anticipated to advance both the practical and the theoretical applications of biomolecule chemistry, material science, and imaging. The purpose of her project is to create a library of compounds with enhanced therapeutic activity using a reliable synthesis method.

Aanchal Aggarwal

Ms. Aanchal Aggarwal is pursuing her Bachelor of Education from Indira Gandhi University, Rewari, Haryana. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature and a master’s degree in linguistics from the University of Delhi. In her postgraduation, she closely studied, researched, and analyzed Hindi language at various levels of language aspects. Her immense interest in language learning and teaching has helped her in earning certificates of excellence from British Council and NPTEL.

Ms. Aggarwal teaches English as a foreign language. She has more than five years of experience teaching young and adult learners coming from diverse linguistic, cultural, and ethical background. Currently, she is providing language and soft skills training through online platforms, Enguru and Spark Studio. She has been a part of ‘Project Spoken English 2019’, which was a partnership project in collaboration with the Directorate of Education Delhi, Macmillan Education, and the British Council. Trinity College, London observed closed sessions for the project. Apart from being a language trainer, she has been associated with several private and non-profit organizations as a training coordinator, annotator, writer, mentor, and campus ambassador.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Ms. Aggarwal will teach Hindi at Boston University. She aims at cultivating her knowledge about the rich cultural and educational pedagogies practiced across the world and aspires to evolve into an accomplished language trainer. She is ambitious and hard-working and yearns to be an inter-cultural conduit of knowledge sharing in this program.

Shivani Bhatt

Ms. Shivani Bhatt is Assistant Professor of Communication at the Department of Management, Institute of Information Technology & Management (IITM), IP University, New Delhi. At IITM, she is actively involved in conducting soft skills training, growth mapping, personality development sessions, and pre-placement training.

Currently pursuing her doctoral research at the English Department, School of Letters, Ambedkar University, Delhi, Ms. Bhatt recently completed her fieldwork in the Garhwal Himalayas region. Her research focuses on exploring the intricate connections between Garhwali women’s folk songs and their reflections of local environment. She has participated in several national and international conferences, including the American Folklore Society’s International Conference, 2019 held in Baltimore, as well as the Women in Asia Conference, 2021 organized by La Trobe University and the Asian Studies Associations, Australia.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Ms. Bhatt draws upon her enthusiasm for folkloristics and communications to teach Hindi at Boston University. Her aim is to maximize her Fulbright experience by fostering a multicultural perspective among her students and by facilitating the exchange of thought-provoking ideas within a global context.