Host City India: Columbia

Arumugam Kumaresan

Dr. Arumugam Kumaresan is an ICAR National Fellow and Principal Scientist at the ICAR-National Dairy Research Institute, Southern Regional Station, Bengaluru, India. With more than two decades’ experience in animal reproduction research, he has established himself as a key scientist in the fields of semen biology, male fertility and reproductive biotechnology. He earned his PhD in veterinary gynecology and obstetrics from the Indian Veterinary Research Institute, India. He completed postdoctoral training at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and the University of Guelph, Canada.

Dr. Kumaresan has led over 30 nationally and internationally funded research projects. His pioneering work has advanced understanding of sperm biology and fertility. Notably, he identified key sperm biomarkers associated with bull fertility and developed a diagnostic kit for fertility prediction. He has authored over 310 peer-reviewed publications and has mentored more than 40 postgraduate and doctoral students. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the National Academy of Dairy Sciences and serves on the editorial boards of several international journals. His scientific contributions have earned global recognition through inclusion in Stanford University and Elsevier/Stanford’s World’s Top 2% Scientists from 2021 to 2025.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Kumaresan is advancing research on biomarker-based sperm phenotyping, next-generation image-based flow cytometry, and genome-to-phenome approaches to identify genetic determinants of male fertility. His work aims to develop a simple, non-invasive diagnostic platform for infertility assessment.

Ayaz Ahmad

Dr. Ayaz Ahmad is Associate Professor at the United World School of Law, Karnavati University, Gandhinagar. He began his academic career at National Law University Odisha, Cuttack and moved to Glocal University, Saharanpur to establish Glocal Law School as the founding faculty. Dr. Ahmad completed his B.A.LL.B degree from the Faculty of Law, Aligarh Muslim University and his LL.M from the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi in 2011. He received his Ph.D. in 2018 under the supervision of Dr. Yogesh Pratap Singh at Glocal University, Saharanpur.

Dr. Ahmad qualified UGC NET and Junior Research Fellowship exams in his first attempt. He was selected by the International Academy for Leadership (IAF) to participate in an international workshop on liberalism in Gummersbach, Germany. He was also selected to participate in an International Summer School: “Pluralism, Development and Social Change” in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Dr. Ahmad teaches constitutional law, jurisprudence, environmental law, and interpretation of statutes. His research interests include constitutional theory and practice, higher education, and social justice. He also seeks to understand the interplay of social, cultural, and political practices in the domain of law and justice administration. He has published several research papers, book chapters, and opinion pieces.

Dr. Ahmad’s Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship project focuses on the constitutive functions of minority rights based on religion by deconstructing the judicial discourse around it. He draws from the socio-political developments in America, which led to the judicial annulment of ‘separate but equal doctrine’ in order to secure democratic educational space.

Kalyan K. Mondal

Dr. Kalyan K. Mondal is presently working as Joint Director (Research) at the ICAR-National Institute of Biotic Stress Management, Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India. Prior to joining ICAR-NIBSM, he worked as Principal Scientist at Division of Plant Pathology, ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi. He worked extensively on the bacterial type-3-secretion-system (T3SS)-effectors and how bacterial pathogens use the effectors to subvert plant immune responses, PTI/ETI. He profiled the T3SS-effectors in two important bacterial pathogens, Xanthomonas axonopodis pv. punicae (Xap) and X. oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo) infecting pomegranate and rice. His group identified key effectors (XopF, XopR in Xoo; XopC2, XopL, XopN in Xap) that immensely contribute to suppress plant immune responses. Using Y2H system his team identified the interactor(s) for effectors and further demonstrated that silencing the interactors in host plants led to disease resistance. Dr. Kalyan is a Fellow of National Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship, Dr. Mondal is investigating the TAL effector PthXo2 of Xoo and its functional role in activating OsSWEET15 during blight disease development using CRISPR-Cas editing tools. This work may help understanding OsSWEET-mediated pathogenesis and identify novel targets to counter bacterial blight disease in rice.

Sriparna Saha

Dr. Sriparna Saha is currently serving as an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Patna, India. She has authored or co-authored more than 400 papers. Her current research interests include machine-learning, deep-learning, natural-language-processing, and biomedical-information-extraction. She is the recipient of Google-India-Women-in-Engineering-Award-2008, NASI-Young-Scientist-Platinum-Jubilee-Award-2016, BIRD Award-2016, IEI-Young-Engineers’-Award-2016, SERB-Women-in-Excellence-Award-2018, Pattern-Recognition-Letters-Editor-Award-2023, prestigious “Young-Faculty-Research-Fellowship” under Visvesvaraya-PhD-Scheme for Electronics-&-IT for-5-years (Jan 2019-Jan 2024), Humboldt-Research-Fellowship, Indo-U.S.-Fellowship-for-Women-in-STEMM-2018. She won the best paper awards in ICONIP 2023, CLINICAL-NLP workshop of COLING 2016, and Area-chair-award (Information Extraction) at IJCNLP-AACL 2023.

With her Fulbright fellowship, at University of South Carolina, Sriparna is working towards developing some unified large language models (LLM) for low-resource settings. In general, it has been shown in the recent literature that the existing LLMs are not performing well for low resource Indian languages like Bengali. This disparity raises concerns about the fairness of LLMs, as it may lead to biased outcomes and unequal access to information and resources for speakers of low-resource languages. In this project Sriparna aims to develop some LLMs for low-resource language setting by developing a scalable training approach using reinforcement learning from human feedback.