Host City India: New Haven

Zahra Rizvi

Ms. Zahra Rizvi is a Ph.D. Scholar and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her research area is an intersection of 21st Century popular culture, literature and media of the United States and the Americas, Urban Studies, Utopia/Dystopia Studies, Youth Activism, and Game Studies. Rizvi studies the political ecology of urban dystopias at this intersection to transform academia in its orientation towards ‘future studies’. Rizvi has presented papers at numerous national and international conferences and has publications in various online and print journals.

Rizvi holds a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Delhi, New Delhi, where she graduated as a double gold medallist. She is the founding-member of the Indian chapter of Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA). She was the Ministry of Education (MHRD) SPARC Fellow in Digital Humanities at Michigan State University, MI, in 2020. In 2021, she was awarded the Electronic Literature Organization Fellowship to work on media archaeology and e-lit practices in South Asia. In 2022, she was awarded the International Youth Library (IYL) Fellowship to conduct research at IYL, Germany, and access their resources, archives and database, for her research in Children’s and Young Adult literary practices and communities, youth activism, and ethical and transformative digital futurisms.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow at Yale University, Rizvi will further her doctoral research considerations and study urban dystopias, their political ecology, and the global/local/glocal responses to the same in contemporary times, especially from South Asian and East Asian perspectives. The Fulbright-Nehru program enables her to study the planetary flows of being and information that underlie the global dystopian condition in contemporary times and explore and conceptualise ‘better futures’ based on safe and sustainable ethics of care.

Shruti Singh

Ms. Shruti Singh is a doctoral candidate at the Computer Science and Engineering department, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Her research interests lie in the field of natural language processing, specifically in learning representations of scientific articles. Her research goal is to develop tools that assist researchers at various stages of the research cycle and democratize the entry of marginalized communities into research.

Ms. Singh received her bachelor’s in information and communication technology with a minor in computational sciences from Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gujarat. Post her bachelor’s, she worked as a research engineer at Raxter and a product engineer at Sprinklr.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Singh is working with Prof. Arman Cohan at Yale University on learning aspect-based representations for scientific articles. Aspect-based representations of research articles will enable fine-grained scholarly search, increase the productivity of researchers, and expedite the process of knowledge discovery.

Kritika Dhyani

Ms. Kritika Dhyani is working at Union World School in Dehradun. Prior to this, she worked as an assistant professor of English in the Department of Humanities at Shivalik College of Engineering, Uttarakhand Technical University, Dehradun. She conducted several courses in English language, literature, and linguistics in classrooms of varied sizes and language competencies. She completed her MA and BA from Hansraj College, University of Delhi. She worked as a teaching volunteer with National Service Scheme instructing underprivileged children. She has a level A2 certificate of proficiency in German from Doon University, Dehradun. She is a gold medallist in her M.Phil. degree in English Language Teaching from Banasthali Vidyapith, Rajasthan. She is pursuing a postgraduate diploma in Translation Studies from Indira Gandhi National Open University.

In her academic oeuvre, Ms. Dhyani has read papers in various seminars and conferences. She considers her paper Media, Nudity, and Gender- Interactions a superlative articulation. Her M.Phil. dissertation is titled Rhetoric of Political Speeches: A study of Donald Trump’s Political campaign. Her areas of interest include deconstruction, gender studies, intersectionality, reader-response criticism, and cultural studies.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Ms. Dhyani will teach Hindi at Yale University. Apart from teaching, she will focus on the exchange of the practices which are an assortment of social, cultural, religious, and regional facets informing language. She aims at utilizing the opportunity to situate and start a dialogue to bring a shift in the dominant narrative about local practices, enhancing mutual understanding of spatial and cultural discourse.

Riddhi Pankhadiwala

Ms. Riddhi Pankhadiwala is working as an L-4 language interpreter and a Gujarati translator at Datamark Incorporated. She completed her master’s in English literature from Symbiosis International University, Pune in 2021. She also holds a master’s in Bharatnatyam and a bachelor’s in Indian classical music. In addition, she earned a diploma in gender and cultural studies from Savitribai Phule University, Pune. Throughout her academic journey, Ms. Pankhadiwala has dedicated herself to bringing Indian mythologies, performing arts, and aesthetics together on common ground for her doctoral research. She published a research paper on social voyeurism in Manjula Padmanabhan’s play Lights Out. Her research areas include Indian mythologies, Indian criticism, and performing aesthetics through literature.

Ms. Pankhadiwala works with Asian-Indians as a professional interpreter and translates across more than four languages. She has also been an active member of the English Language Teachers’ Association in Pune for a few years.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Ms. Pankhadiwala is teaching Hindi at Yale University. Having experienced a diversity of cultures around the world, she is working on finding a way to intermingle the cultures of the East and the West through performing arts and literature and to bring them to life on a stage. She aspires to utilize her Fulbright experiences to invent new teaching methods amidst the traditional approach of teaching in her own country, and to come up with more hands-on and practice-oriented pedagogies grounded in art and literature.

Sakshi Shukla

Ms. Sakshi Shukla is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB), Mumbai. The aim of her Ph.D. thesis is to identify a biomarker to predict Levodopa Induced Dyskinesia (LID) in Parkinson’s disease patients based on multimodal neuroimaging, clinical and behavioral characteristics. She is one of the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN) Global Scholars selected in 2022 to participate in the online MRI graduate program and clinical neuroimaging course at Oxford University, UK.

Ms. Shukla has completed her bachelor’s degree in zoology (H) from Daulat Ram College, University of Delhi. Later, she pursued her master’s in medical biotechnology and graduated as a gold medalist from Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak. She has qualified exams such as CSIR-UGC NET JRF, GATE, BET, CEEB, IIT-JAM. Beyond academics, she loves to interact with people and acquire new skills. She is an outdoor enthusiast and loves to travel to natural places.

During the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship tenure, Ms. Shukla is learning newer techniques in medical imaging for movement disorders, such as Neuromelanin MRI, and NODDI (neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging). She intends to draw meaningful inferences from the collected data with the help of a clinical neuroimaging expert.

Kasturi Das

Dr. Kasturi Das is professor of economics at IMT Ghaziabad (IMTG). She has held multiple advisory positions in India and globally in the field of trade and the environment including the World Economic Forum’s expert group on Trade and Climate Change, and the Government of India’s high-level advisory committee on Trade and the Environment. As a member of Climate Strategies, London, Prof. Das co-led multiple research projects on trade-climate interface. A PhD in Economics from the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning (CESP), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, Prof. Das has published extensively in the field of trade and climate change in leading scholarly journals including Nature, the American Journal of International Law, the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, and Global Environmental Change. She has delivered numerous talks and lectures, and has consulted with multiple institutions across geographies including Oxford Martin School, Tufts University, and the United Nations. In 2019, Prof. Das was hosted by the University of Oxford as a Chevening Research, Science, and Innovation Leadership (CRISP) fellow. Earlier in 2007, she visited the University of Cambridge as a Ford fellow. In 2011, she went to the University of East Anglia as the ESRC’s Governance of Clean Development visiting fellow. At IMTG, as the founding head of the I’M The Change initiative on Sustainability and Social Responsibility (SSR) since 2016, Prof. Das conceptualized and developed an innovative, service-learning course for MBA students. In its seventh year, this course has touched the lives of thousands of peoples belonging to under-served communities. Under her leadership, the I’M The Change initiative won the ‘Innovations that Inspire Challenge 2018’ of AACSB International.

During her Fulbright-Kalam Climate Fellowship for Academic and Professional Excellence at Yale University, CT, Prof. Das is exploring the role of the global trading system in supporting industrial decarbonization and just transition in hard-to-abate sectors in developing countries, with a particular focus on the steel industry in India.

Payal Saini

Payal Saini, a NET and GATE-qualified scholar, is currently an assistant professor at Poornima University, Jaipur. She completed her master’s in English from the Central University of Gujarat in 2023. At Poornima University, she teaches literature and communication skills to undergraduate students, blending traditional and contemporary teaching methodologies. Payal is involved in curating cultural events, fostering a vibrant academic community for both faculty members and students.

Payal has actively participated in the Jaipur Literature Festival as a volunteer, where she was part of the social media team and was responsible for working on ground to capture the ambience of the festival, behind-the-scenes activities, and key sessions to generate online content for the festival. Her academic interests lie in folklore and Shekhawati literature, and she is researching the linguistic nuances and usage of the Shekhawati dialect in music. Beyond academia, she has extensive experience as a freelance content writer for various firms.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at Yale University, New Haven, CT, Payal is dedicated to promoting the Hindi language on a global scale. She seeks to employ natural language processing techniques to enhance the accessibility and understanding of Hindi texts. She is keen on developing innovative pedagogies for language teaching, intending to implement these methods in her future endeavors.

Ranjit Kumar

Ranjit Kumar, a nautical science graduate, has extensive experience of sailing. He has traveled around the world as a merchant navy officer, learning about the complexity and diversity of the marine environment and picking up a wide array of survival skills. For his leadership and managerial skills, he was appointed as chief cadet captain. As a member of Indian Administrative Service (IAS), he has been dealing with critical interventions in development and regulatory administration for the past 16 years. For his all-round performance, he was awarded best ‘District Collector’ by the Government of Maharashtra.

As the district collector of Gadchiroli, an area severely affected by left wing extremism, Ranjit has laid extra emphasis on socio-economic development to further the cause of peace. For his innovative approach and effective contribution, he has been awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Public Administration.

Currently, as director of National Jal Jeevan Mission, Ranjit is engaged in policy formulation and implementation of the National Jal Jeevan Mission, one of the largest programs in the world, related to Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 6). He believes inclusive and rapid economic development with ecological sustainability is a major challenge. A study of environmental management and policy analysis will equip him with the necessary knowledge and skills to work on this challenge and help improve the quality of life of millions of citizens. Ranjit is a marathon runner, an excellent swimmer, and a sports enthusiast.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Ranjit hopes to gain valuable cross-cultural exposure, a chance to learn from diverse professionals, and an opportunity to befriend multi-talented individuals.