Tallahassee Archives

Gowramma Ittara Poovaiah

Dr. Gowramma Poovaiah Ittira is a Professor at the Regional Institute of Education, Bhubaneswar, NCERT. She teaches right from the grass root level of Bachelors of Integrated Teacher Education Programme and extends her guidance to her doctoral candidates, thus covering a wide range of students from sectoral socio-lingual communities of varied age groups. She reaches up to approximately 900 to 1000 student teachers per year and mentors about a quarter of these students in their internships while they teach in varied, diverse locations among the four states in the eastern region of India. Her current role helps in facilitating and informing research, including culturally relevant practices from varied parts of India and disseminating the results to reach schools all around India.

Dr. Ittira’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to examine how and in what ways early literacy is affected by socio cultural practices. This project will document sociocultural practices adopted in early childhood and study their influence on literacy readiness. Furthermore, it will help inform literacy initiatives in local language and English, in India, highlighting what practices in early childhood education are beneficial. The project initiated from her home institute, Regional Institute of Education (RIE) Bhubaneswar, where she was exposed to the diverse languages of eastern India and its cultural diversity. She found similarities in practices in these practices with Kodava, her homeland. Thus, the research will directly contribute to early literacy development while incorporating the rich sociocultural practices. It will have a wide application in multilingual communities around India to foster literacy and early language acquisition while celebrating the vast cultural and linguistic diversity. Her current role will facilitate research in culturally relevant curriculum construction and practices along with possible forms of alternative education from varied parts of India and disseminating the results to reach schools all around India.

Shivangi Mittal

Ms. Shivangi Mittal is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. She works in the domain of rheology and focuses on developing a theoretical and mathematical approach for understanding nonlinear rheological data for complex fluids. She is a recipient of the Prime Minister Research Fellowship from the Government of India that funds her research at IIT Kanpur. She earned her bachelor’s in chemical engineering from Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, Rajasthan. She has published in international peer-reviewed journals and presented at several conferences. Apart from research, she is passionate about teaching and is engaged in teaching B.Tech. students at government engineering colleges in Kanpur.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Mittal is developing the mathematical framework required to analyze thermodynamically out-of-equilibrium systems, or thixotropic materials, that have a time evolving structure and so, produce time-invariant outputs when subjected to oscillatory shear deformations. Her work presents new insights in understanding and defining thixotropy and viscoelasticity through rheological data.

Amarjeet

Amarjeet was born and brought up in a farmer family in western Uttar Pradesh, a state known as the sugar bowl of India. Since his childhood he has had an interest in understanding the science behind natural phenomena. He pursued his bachelor’s and master’s from Gurukula Kangri (Deemed to be University), Haridwar, under the DST-INSPIRE scholarship program of the Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India. He pursued his post-graduation in physics, where he studied atmospheric physics as one of his specializations. He is currently working at CORAL, IIT Kharagpur as a DST-INSPIRE doctoral fellow.

For his doctoral research, Amarjeet is studying the changes in monsoon dynamics in recent climate change scenarios. He looks into the dynamical and thermodynamical features of atmosphere-ocean interaction that induce and modulate the Indian Summer Monsoon Rainfall (ISMR).

As a Fulbright-Kalam Climate fellow at Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, Amarjeet will be studying state-of-the-art climate models at a supercomputer cluster to understand the mechanism of extreme rainfall events over India and its hill regions. He is focusing on future climate projections of such events and on shaping policies to mitigate and adapt to upcoming warming conditions. . Amarjeet is fond of singing and listening to regional folk songs. He writes poems in Hindi and enjoys reading ancient Vedic literature.