Host City India: Lubbock

Shiju Sam Varughese

Dr. Shiju Sam Varughese is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Studies in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (CSSTIP) in the School of Social Sciences of Central University of Gujarat (CUG), Gandhinagar. After receiving basic training in biology, he completed his M.Phil research on People’s Science Movements (PSMs) and doctoral research on public controversies over science in media from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Dr. Varughese works on issues related to science and democracy by employing concepts and tools from History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science. He has authored Contested Knowledge: Science, Media, and Democracy in Kerala (Oxford University Press, 2017) and co-edited Kerala Modernity: Ideas, Spaces and Practices in Transition (Orient Blackswan, 2015). His current research interests include public engagement with science and technology, risk governance, new social movements, social history of knowledge, science and technology in popular culture, and regional modernities.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship, Dr. Varughese will theorise how the post-disaster societies develop new practices of care to reconstruct their life in the context of the pesticide disaster caused by the aerial spraying of Endosulfan in the cashew plantations in Kasaragod district of Kerala. He will argue that the practices of the community in the post-disaster reconstructive phase will be helpful in developing a new participatory model of risk governance to survive recurrent disasters.

Priyanka Jamwal

Dr. Priyanka Jamwal is currently working as a Fellow in the Centre for Environment and Development, ATREE, Bengaluru. She completed her B. Tech in Civil Engineering from NIT Hamirpur (1997–2001) and Masters in Environmental Engineering from Punjab Technical University, Chandigarh (2001-2003) with several distinctions and her doctoral degree in Environmental Engineering and Management from IIT Delhi (2003–2008). She broadly works in water resource management with a focus on water quality. Her work focuses on identifying contaminant sources in surface water bodies, modelling the fate and transport of contaminants in urban hydrological systems and assessing the risk to human health due to exposure to contaminants. Her empirical work has focused on quantifying microbial load from point and non-point sources in urbanising watersheds. Her work on the fate of trace metals and nutrients in urban hydrological systems has identified gaps in India’s water quality regulatory frameworks.

She has made significant contributions in the field of environmental pollution and human health risk assessment. Her work also focuses on understanding the groundwater sanitation nexus in the peri-urban spaces that lack piped water supply and centralised sanitation infrastructures. She applies interdisciplinary approaches to understand the factors that drive humans to interact with the environment in a certain way that impacts water resources. She is also interested in developing design principles for the deployment and scaling of Nature-based solutions (NBS) to address water pollution issues in urban and rural areas.