Host City India: Tucson

Neha Khatri

Dr. Neha Khatri is Principal Scientist at the Department of Manufacturing Science & Instrumentation, CSIR-CSIO, Chandigarh. She is a young researcher working in the area of ultra precision machining and optical metrology techniques for smart manufacturing.

Dr. Khatri earned her bachelor’s in mechanical engineering in 2010 from the University Institute of Engineering and Technology, Kanpur and her master’s in advanced instrumentation engineering in 2012 from the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), Chennai. She then joined as a scientist at CSIR-CSIO, Chandigarh in November, 2012. She received her Ph.D. in 2019 in opto-mechanical instrumentation from AcSIR, Chennai. She made significant contributions to advanced manufacturing techniques using ultra precision machining protocol for the development of various techniques and products for societal and strategic applications. Her research findings and investigations have received recognition through high impact publications, international collaborations, as well as transfer of technologies. Dr. Khatri’s scientific recognitions include Raman Research Fellowship 2021-22, SERB Women Excellence Award 2022, INAE Young Engineer Award 2021, and IEI Young Engineer Award 2022 for her notable contribution in the area of ultra-precision machining. She has received many best paper awards in various international conferences. She was inducted in the second BRICS Young Scientist Conclave to represent India at Hangzhou, China in 2017.

The key hurdle in high throughput precision freeform optics fabrication is quality control. As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research postdoctoral research fellow, Dr. Khatri is working at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Her research focuses on developing on-machine metrology for precision fabrication of freeform optics with fast measurements and analyses for closed loop control and optimization.

Gopal Murali

Dr. Gopal Murali’s research interest spans many areas in ecology and evolution pertaining to biological diversity at various scales and organizations. He obtained his PhD in 2020 from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. His doctoral research focused on understanding the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms underlying defensive animal colourations and has published several research articles in reputed, peer-reviewed international journals. After his PhD, Dr. Murali was awarded the PBC postdoctoral fellowship for outstanding Chinese and Indian postdoctoral fellows by the Council for Higher Education, Israel (2020). His current work at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, applies macroecological and macroevolutionary perspectives to characterize processes that underlie various broad-scale biodiversity patterns, and to predict how biodiversity will shift in response to recent environmental change.

Climate change poses a major threat to biodiversity, and there is an urgent need to forecast the effects of climate change on species persistence to inform conservation. During his Fulbright-Nehru postdoctoral research fellowship, in collaboration with Prof. John J. Wiens, Dr. Murali aims to utilize data from recent species’ responses to climate change to incorporate the adaptive capacity of species in climate change vulnerability assessments.

Ammoose Kunjanparampil Jayan

Ammoose K. Jayan is currently conducting her research under the DST-Inspire Junior Research Fellowship at the Department of Geology, Central University of Kerala, Kerala. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Geology and Water Management with first-rank from Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala. She is also a first-rank holder during her Master’s in Geology from Central University of Kerala, India. Her doctoral research mainly focuses on the paleoceanographic investigations of sediments from the Bay of Bengal (BoB). She studies the assemblages of planktonic foraminifera and its shells’ geochemical composition in order to understand the impact of climatic and environmental changes on modern and fossil organisms, particularly during the Holocene.

Ms. Jayan has published her research findings in the International journal Marine Micropaleontology and presented her work at several National and International conferences. In 2021, she was awarded with the TMS Grant-in-Aid, by The Micropaleontological Society, London. In the same year, she also participated in a scientific expedition to BoB Onboard Sagar Kanya Research Vessel, to collect gravity core samples for her research. During her Master’s, she was one of the recipients of the Indian Academy of Sciences’ Summer Research Fellowship, 2018, and had conducted research at the National Institute of Oceanography, Visakhapatnam.

As a Fulbright-Kalam Fellow, Ms. Jayan will work on the fate of the East India Coastal Current (EICC) during the Holocene and H1 event, correlating with excessively strong and weak phases of ISM variability. Another goal of this research is to test any offset in the elemental and isotopic composition of the morphotypes of Globigerinoides ruber, a mixed-layer planktonic foraminiferal species, from the BoB.