Host City India: New York

Deboshree Mukherjee

Dr. Deboshree Mukherjee is Dr. D. S. Kothari Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Chemistry, University of Burdwan, West Bengal. Earlier, she worked as Research Associate atthe Center of Excellence in Advance Materials, NIT Durgapur, West Bengal. She completed her Ph.D. from CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, Hyderabad in 2019. Her doctoral research was in the area of heterogeneous catalysis.

Dr. Mukherjee’s research interest lies in the design and development of novel nanomaterials for catalytic oxidation-reduction processes for environmental remediation, biodiesel and other fine chemicals production, photocatalytic advanced oxidation processes, and nanozyme applications. She has published several research articles in high impact international journals, review articles, popular journal articles, and book chapters during her Ph.D. and post-doctoral work. She was awarded the junior research fellowship (JRF) by the Government of India after she qualified the CSIR-UGC NET examination and the prestigious Dr. D. S. Kothari Post-Doctoral research fellowship by the UGC, Government of India.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship, Dr. Mukherjee is focusing on the design and development of metal organic framework supported single atom catalyst (SAC) for preferential oxidation of carbon monoxide in hydrogen rich stream for proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell application. In SAC, all catalytically active metal centers are atomically dispersed on a stable support. The SACs are superior to metal or metal oxide nanocatalysts in terms of high metal atom utilization efficiency, unique electronic properties and special size quantum effects, resulting in improved catalytic performance.

Disha Wadekar

Ms. Disha Wadekar is an independent advocate practicing before the Supreme Court of India and various High Courts in India. Her practice focuses on representing marginalized communities on matters pertaining to constitutional law and anti-discrimination law. She has worked on many constitution bench matters, including the famous Sabarimala temple entry case and the economically weaker section (EWS) reservation case. In 2022, she was appointed the Assistant Special Public Prosecutor by the Government of Rajasthan.

An engineer-turned-lawyer, Ms. Wadekar completed her undergraduate law degree from Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU), Pune. She has taught courses on law and marginalization at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, and National Law University, Delhi, and has delivered lectures at various institutions. She is also a member of the academic committee on Denotified Tribes at SPPU, Pune, and of the research ethics committee at the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies (IIDS), Delhi.

In 2021, Ms. Wadekar co-founded Community for the Eradication of Discrimination in Education and Employment (CEDE)—an organization working towards a diverse and inclusive Indian legal profession and the judiciary. She has also provided consultancy to organizations, such as the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, Delhi. Her work has been published by reputed journals and online portals.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellowship, Ms. Wadekar is pursuing LLM from Columbia University. She hopes to learn about the feminist, indigenous, and critical race critiques of the justice system. She believes her fellowship will enable her to contribute to litigation, research, and advocacy interventions that foreground rights-based anti-caste and intersectional perspectives in the Indian justice system.

Vidita Vaidya

Prof. Vidita Vaidya is Professor and Chairperson, the Department of Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. Prof. Vaidya’s research group at TIFR works on understanding the neurocircuitry of emotion, its modulation by life experience, and the alterations in emotional neurocircuitry that underlie complex psychiatric disorders, like anxiety and depression. Her work delves into how the experience of early adversity can recruit pathways regulated by the neurotransmitter, serotonin, to shape the long-term programming of mood-related behavior. Her research team also investigates the mechanistic details of the influence of pharmacological antidepressants and serotonergic psychedelics on mood-related behavior, in particular the consequences on bioenergetics in neuronal cells.

Prof. Vaidya received her undergraduate training at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai and her Ph.D. in neuroscience at Yale University. Following postdoctoral fellowships at Karolinska Institute and Oxford University, she returned to a faculty position at TIFR in 2000. She was the recipient of the Infosys Prize in Life Sciences in 2022. She is committed to mentorship, equity and diversity in STEM.

Prof. Vaidya’s Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence project is focussed on understanding the impact of serotonergic psychedelics on mitochondrial biogenesis and function in distinct limbic brain regions. Her work explores whether serotonergic psychedelics, through modulation of mitochondrial biogenesis and function, impact neuronal and synaptic plasticity, influence neuronal architecture and regulate mood-related behaviors.

Payoshi Roy

Ms. Payoshi Roy has practiced as a criminal defense lawyer since graduating from National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata in 2015. Her practice focuses on representing prisoners on death row and indigent persons sentenced to life imprisonment before the Supreme Court of India and the Bombay High Court. In defending activists and terror accused, she has contested state excesses and abuse of anti-terror legislations in India. She also represents victims in custodial death cases challenging police impunity to ensure prosecution of police officers. Outside of courts, she has taught courses on capital punishment and criminal law in law schools across India.

Through her master’s in law as a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, Ms. Roy is undertaking comparative interdisciplinary research on sentencing, abuse of anti-terror laws, and institutional reform.

Shivam Rawal

Mr. Shivam Rawal is a domain expert in education measurement, assessments and evaluation and has extensive experience in designing, implementing, and managing several large-scale education projects in India. He exhibits a deep passion and commitment to serve the public sector using grassroots insights. Mr. Rawal’s first-hand experience of educational inequality inspired him to join the Teach For India Fellowship, where he taught over eighty students in a low-resource government school in India. Leveraging this experience and creating an impact at scale, he has worked with multiple state governments, nonprofits, and schools to improve student learning outcomes through assessments and the capacity-building of stakeholders at Central Square Foundation and Educational Initiatives. Shivam was nominated as a Global Girls Education Fellow in 2020 by Teach For All, where he learned about best practices in girls’ education as a part of the global cohort of fellows committed to improving educational outcomes for girls and women.

Through the graduate program in economics and education at Columbia University, Mr. Rawal aims to create more inclusive and equitable education systems by strengthening the evidence-based policy practice and processes in India. Learning about quantitative methods, experiments, and data analysis will provide him with a solid methodological grounding for rigorous policy evaluations to improve education programs and interventions. Ultimately, the direct beneficiaries of his work will be education practitioners and policymakers, but the fruit of this investment through the Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Fellowship will trickle down to millions of students and teachers in India.

Aesha Datta

Ms. Aesha Datta graduated in English literature from Hindu College, University of Delhi in 2008 and went on to study journalism at the Asian College of Journalism. She has been a journalist for over 12 years and has worked with publications such as ET Prime, The Hindu Business Line and the India Today Group. Her writing has focused on the intersection of the climate crisis and its impact on society. In her last stint as an Assistant Editor – Environment with ET Prime, she single-handedly steered the environmental and climate coverage for the publication.

In 2017, she was awarded the WWF-India Young Media Climate Fellowship, during which she reported from the Sundarbans and Ladakh on climate-linked migration and community-led climate adaptation.

Her experiences with climate impacts as an environmental journalist, and prior to that as a volunteer for organizations such as Greenpeace India, drives her to keep a people-first approach to her writing and to connect the dots between climate science, policy, economics, and community impact.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow at Columbia University, she is studying the convergence of climate science, equity, policy, law, and business. Upon returning to India, she intends to continue to communicate the ever-intensifying climate crisis and expects that her master’s degree will both improve her understanding of the subject and her ability to articulate the same. She wants to combine her years of practical, on-ground experience with the academic training she receives to work in the public policy and advocacy space.

Zubin Dash

Mr. Zubin Dash is an advocate practicing at the Supreme Court, various High Courts, and Tribunals in India since 2016. He has been involved in constitutional and criminal litigation for the enforcement of fundamental rights and civil liberties. He is the youngest researcher to have been awarded the prestigious Lok Sabha Research Fellowship by the Speaker of Parliament and has authored a book on privacy laws in India. He appeared before a Parliamentary Committee, submitted reports, and assisted Parliamentarians with legislative-drafting and policymaking in the areas of privacy law, data-protection, and surveillance-reforms. Previously, Mr. Dash was consulted by the government for suggesting legislative amendments relating to national security. He also worked as Research Assistant to a former Supreme Court Judge.

Mr. Dash graduated from the National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS) with a gold medal for successfully representing India at the Jessup International Moot-Court Competition, Washington DC, USA and was adjudged ‘Best Speaker’ at a similar competition. He has completed courses from the Hague Academy of International Law and ISIL and is a member of the American Society of International Law and the Commonwealth Lawyers’ Association. He was on the editorial boards of the NUJS Law Review and the National Police Academy Criminal Law Review and has seven publications to his credit.

During his LLM at Columbia University, Mr. Dash will focus on constitutional law, civil liberties, and criminal justice. In particular, he plans to study how technology impacts the enjoyment of rights, the changing relationship between the state, citizens, and corporate entities, and comparative constitutional theory.

Aananth Daksnamurthy

Mr. Aananth Daksnamurthy is currently pursuing writing, translation, and title acquisitions as a freelancer. As a literature connoisseur, he is closely following the broad contours of Indian vernacular publishing.

His foray into writing happened when he joined the founding team of a Delhi-based news organization, The Print. In his professional journey, he has gathered various experiences in the publishing industry, from a business analyst to a contributing journalist. For a brief period, he was also engaged by the Editors Guild of India. As part of the team that built India’s first academic fellowship for lawyers, he has dabbled in the Indian higher education space for a while. In his latest stint, Mr. Daksnamurthy was a consultant with the Government of Tamil Nadu, leading their media team for the Industries Department. On several occasions, he has also had the privilege of drafting speeches for the Chief Minister and senior bureaucrats.

Born in Tiruchirappalli, Mr. Daksnamurthy graduated with a B. Tech in mechanical engineering from SASTRA University. He also has a postgraduate diploma in liberal arts from Ashoka University as a Young India Fellow. He is a World Economic Forum Global Shaper and a Climate Reality Leader.

A graduate program in publishing as a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow will not only help Mr. Daksnamurthy excel in key publishing business functions but also open doors to a vast network of industry executives, publishers, and editors. His objective is to build a space for vernacular languages in public discourse within India and the world.

Soumya Anakkavur Katchi

Ms. Soumya AK graduated in 2018 from National Law University, Delhi. She worked in a leading all service firm before shifting to a criminal justice reform and litigation center, Project 39A where she has worked for over two years on issues pertaining to mental health and criminal justice in India. As part of her work, she has also worked on death penalty cases with mental health concerns. She has also developed a first-of-its-kind course on forensic mental health in collaboration with Monash University at Australia. Currently, she is working on an empirical study on the insanity defense in India and leads the communications and outreach work at Project 39A.

At Columbia University, she is specializing in the domain of criminal justice and human rights, with a specific focus on examining institutional barriers and development of access to justice mechanisms for the vulnerable and marginalized, from the perspective of the right to a fair and just trial. On returning to India, she intends to continue with her focus on these issues and expects that the master’s degree will inform and enable both her research on these issues as well as advocacy and capacity building with the stakeholders in the criminal justice system.

Sharmistha Saha

Sharmistha Saha is assistant professor of Performance Studies at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai. She completed her PhD from the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany. Erasmus Mundus followed by the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded her doctoral study. Later, she was a DFG postdoctoral fellow at Dahlem Research School, Berlin, Germany. She has been a UGC Junior Research Fellow at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. In the past she has been a Becas MAEC-AECID fellow at the Universidad de Granada, Spain. Her research interests include theatre historiography, performance philosophy, colonial theatre, theories of acting, aesthetics and politics, archive and the arts and critical theory. She is the author of Theatre and National Identity in Colonial India: Formation of a community through cultural practice (Springer/Aakar, 2017). Sharmistha is also a theatre practitioner and some of her directorial work includes ‘Playing to Bombay’ co-created with Sunil Shanbag, ‘Her Letters’ commissioned by the Tagore Centre in Berlin, ‘Romeo Ravidas aur Juliet Devi’ amongst others. She most recently was part of the international inter-medial project ‘Elephants in Rooms’ facilitated by the German-UK based Gobs Squad Arts Collective. She has closely worked with the theatre stalwart Eugenio Barba and his company Odin Teatret in Denmark.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship Sharmistha will be working on the project ‘Community identity, cultural performance and value: politics of intercultural exchange between the ‘west’ and postcolonial India’ at the TISCH School of the Arts, New York University. Her work will focus on politics of community identity, cultural performances as inheritance and its associated value in the context of ‘intercultural theatre’.