Host City USA: Bengaluru

Neha Lodha

Dr. Neha Lodha is an engineer-turned-neuroscientist. She is a tenured associate professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science and the School of Biomedical Engineering at Colorado State University (CSU). She earned her PhD in kinesiology from the University of Florida, following a BTech in information and communication technology from DA-IICT, Gandhinagar, India.

Dr. Lodha directs the Laboratory of Movement Neuroscience and Rehabilitation at CSU. Her research applies approaches in cognitive aging, movement neuroscience, and neurorehabilitation with the goal of improving functional independence, mobility, and overall well-being of individuals facing age-related or neurological challenges. Her interdisciplinary approach bridges biomechanics, neuroscience, and digital health to better understand and support cognitive and physical functioning in everyday life. Her current work in her lab focuses on identifying early indicators of reduced mobility and cognitive performance. This includes examining how people move in their daily environments, how their cognitive and motor systems interact, and how technology can assist in rehabilitation and health monitoring. Complementing her research, Dr. Lodha leads community outreach through her lab’s initiatives. These include mobility assessments and fall-prevention screenings for older adults, as well as educational programs for students interested in science and engineering.

Dr. Lodha has authored over 50 scholarly publications, including 40 peer-reviewed journal articles, and her work has been cited more than 3,400 times. She has a strong track record in securing external research funding as a principal investigator, having obtained competitive awards from agencies like the National Institute on Aging, the American Heart Association, and the Alzheimer’s Association.

The global rise of dementia significantly affects populations in low- and middle-income countries. In communities with limited access to formal education and healthcare, cognitive impairments often go undiagnosed. Most current assessments cater to English-speaking and literate individuals and are not effective for people in other contexts. Dr. Lodha’s Fulbright-Nehru project is developing a performance-based tool designed to work across language and education levels within the Indian population. The project’s primary aim is to improve early detection of cognitive decline.

Jamie Barber

Prof. Jamie Barber holds a position in the academic and professional writing program at the University at Buffalo where she also served as the interim director of the Journalism Certificate Program in 2021-2022. Prof. Barber’s work in the classroom aims to decenter concepts of “normal” in order to invite students to leverage their diverse backgrounds and abilities as they develop their writing skills. She recently taught a class titled “Writing for Change” in which students learned research and writing skills while trying to enact change on a real-world problem that intersected with their interests and identities. These writing students extended the impact of their writing and learning by creating multimodal “campaigns” to get the word out about their change-making ideas. Students created activist-centered zines, podcasts, infographics, and other documents that extended beyond text-based communication. Prof. Barber is currently co-designing a first-year writing course in which students will explore their language backgrounds while speculating on what linguistic justice might look like in academic and professional writing contexts.

Prof. Barber’s creative work often focuses on interactions between humans and the more-than-human world. Her essay “The Trouble with Cockroaches” explores tension between a “do-no-harm” attitude and a cockroach infestation. Her essay “Accepting Impermanence” speculates that ancient people may have advice for a new mother. Prof. Barber is also developing her journalism portfolio, recently writing about earthquake research for Temblor, and about the Buffalo, NY community for Buffalo Rising.

Prof. Barber’s Fulbright-Nehru project seeks to build a collaborative framework between students, educators, artists, designers, and scientists. She plans to work with the Science Gallery Bengaluru, an institution already engaged in powerful connections between the arts and the sciences, to build workshops that will connect students to this collaborative framework. Students will learn science while they engage in multimodal science communication projects.

Sofya Yuditskaya

Ms. Sofya Yuditskaya is a site-specific media artist, curator, and educator working with sound, video, interactivity, projections, code, paper, and salvaged material. Her work focuses on techno-occult rituals, street performance, and participatory art. Ms. Yuditskaya’s performances enact and reframe hegemonies, she works with materials that exemplify our deep entanglement with petro-culture and technology’s effect on consciousness. She has worked on projects at Eyebeam, 3LD, the Netherlands Institute voor Media Kunst, Steim, ARS Electronica, Games for Learning Institute, The Guggenheim (NYC), The National Mall and has taught at GAFFTA, MoMA, NYU, Srishti, and the Rubin Museum. She is a PhD Candidate in Music Composition at NYU GSAS.

Ms. Yuditskaya Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on an in-depth, detailed and immersive study of global Noise Music through the lens of the remarkable contemporary Indian contribution to it. Noise Music is vitally important to understand its global forms, structures and driving forces. In today’s measured world, it embodies a fulcrum of technology, chaos, and the sublime. Living and studying in Bangalore offers her a deep insight into the ways that South Indian artists listen to and construct Noise Music. Ms. Yuditskaya aims to develop a rich vocabulary for talking about, and teaching Noise, in the framework of traditional music and in conversation with U.S. musical output.

Anna Correa

Ms. Anna Correa is a recent graduate of the University of Iowa College of Public Health where she received a Masters of Public Health in Community and Behavioral Health. She previously completed bachelor’s degrees in public health and international relations (transnational issues emphasis) at the University of Iowa. Ms. Correa’s educational background includes work in migration, qualitative research methods, and community-engaged public health. During her time in college, Ms. Correa worked for the University of Iowa Prevention Research Center for Rural Health where she assisted in the implementation of a community-based physical activity program. She is the Principal Investigator for a research study examining the impact of COVID-19 on student resident assistants in university dorms.

Outside of academics, Ms. Correa was deeply involved in her community, serving as the President for Iowa Agni South Asian A Cappella group, Co-Chair of the University Lecture Committee, and member of many additional groups. In 2021, Ms. Correa began studying Hindi through the Critical Language Scholarship and will continue her studies in 2022 with the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship.

Ms. Correa loves people, and she tries to get to know everyone she can. She looks forward to her time in Bangalore and hopes to meet many new friends in her time there.

As Bangalore continues to grow, the migrant population increases but the support for migrant laborer well-being has not kept pace. Ms. Correa, as part of her Fulbright-Nehru project, aims to conduct qualitative research with three unique migrant groups: i) construction workers, ii) artisans, and iii) information technology employees. In doing so, Ms. Correa hopes to better understand the needs of migrant laborers in the city and build relationships between researchers at St. John’s and members of the migrant worker community.

Rumaan Malhotra

Dr. Rumaan Malhotra is a wildlife biologist with a background in endangered species conservation. More recently, he has been interested in the spatial ecology of human-tolerant species. Currently, he studies how various human impacts interact in their effects on native carnivores such as foxes and small wildcats. In particular, he is interested in the role of domestic dogs in driving native carnivore space usage. He earned his PhD from the University of Michigan, and his bachelor’s from Drexel University. Dr. Malhotra carried out his doctoral work in Southern Chile, where he found that agricultural landscapes were preferentially used by dogs, which affected where native foxes were found. As an avid photographer, Dr. Malhotra always has a camera in hand to document the landscapes, in which he works, and their wild inhabitants.

Dr. Malhotra aims to be studying the movement ecology of free-ranging domestic dogs in the Spiti Valley of Himachal Pradesh. He will be determining if distinct groups of dogs can be identified by their movement behavior, and if their movement corresponds with where threat of disease spillover is concentrated for humans and wildlife (specifically, rabies and canine distemper), with the spatial use of wildlife, and with livestock mortality.

Sandip Mazumder

Dr. Sandip Mazumder is professor and associate chair of mechanical and aerospace engineering at The Ohio State University (OSU). He joined OSU in March 2004. Prior to OSU, he was employed at the CFD Research Corporation in Huntsville, AL, for seven years. He is one of the architects and early developers of the commercial code, CFD-ACE+™. His research is computational in nature and spans three main areas: computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer emphasizing on chemical reactions, with applications in combustion, catalytic conversion, fuel cells, batteries, and chemical vapor deposition; thermal radiation and its applications; and non-equilibrium transport phenomena as occurring in nanoscale systems. He has been active in raising awareness about global warming and climate change among engineering students and the general public through his classroom teaching and seminars. Dr. Mazumder is the author of two graduate-level textbooks, more than 65 journal papers, and over 65 peer-reviewed conference publications. He is the recipient of the McCarthy Engineering Teaching Award and the Lumley Research Award from the OSU College of Engineering. He has also been a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers since 2011.

In light of the fact that the U.S. and India are ranked second and third, respectively, among the highest carbon dioxide-producing nations, Dr. Mazumder’s Fulbright-Kalam project involves a collaborative one-semester part-teaching, part-research stint at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru. For this, he is creating and deploying two modules with the objective of increasing awareness about global warming and its causes among the future engineering workforce in both the countries. While the teaching module has a short ambit, the research module, titled “Hierarchical Models for Atmospheric Solar Radiation Transport and Earth’s Temperature Predictions”, is attempting to answer long-standing questions on the impact of greenhouse gases on global warming.

Caroline Troy

Caroline Troy is a recent graduate of Brown University where she earned her BSc in environmental science, with a focus on conservation science and policy. For her senior honors thesis, she researched environmental predictors of biogeographical variations in woodpecker drumming. She has interned with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s ForestGEO program, Brooklyn College’s Urban Ecology and Environment NSF REU, Morgan State University’s Patuxent Environmental & Aquatic Research Laboratory, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Brown University Herbarium.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Caroline is researching the effect of urbanization on bat diversity in South India. In this context, she is carrying out passive acoustic monitoring across undeveloped to highly urbanized bat habitat sites in and around Bengaluru. India is home to around 130 bat species. However, these remarkable mammals are threatened by habitat loss due to urbanization, logging, and agriculture. It is estimated that a quarter of the bat species in India are vulnerable or endangered. In order to create effective conservation strategies, Caroline is examining which bat species can coexist with humans in developed regions and which may be threatened without habitat preservation.

Lilith Saylor

Lilith Saylor is interested in challenging the assumption that technology and rural spaces exist in contradiction and believes that rural spaces exist as integral, active contributors to the globalized world. An at-large scholar with a background in economics and development studies, as well as family ties in Kentucky’s Appalachian region, Lilith is both excited by and critical of technology’s role in rural development. She graduated from Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2020, with majors in economics, political science, and international relations. She went on to work in startups as one of the founding team members of BioSolution Designs, and also wrote critically on biometric technology and its political and socioeconomic entanglements in her paper, “Suspicion Encoded: Women of Color and Biometric Technology in the United States”, which was published by California Polytechnic State University’s sprinkle journal. She has also spoken on the importance of building technology by considering the right to privacy, in her workshop, “Built to Protect”, at Technica Hackathon 2021 and TechTogether Atlanta 2022.

Lilith’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the factors influencing active rural digital engagement by comparing the interests, needs, and values of smallholder family farms in Karnataka to the digital technologies they consume. Bengaluru’s digital agritech startups depend on their ability (and obligation) to engage with smallholders as decision-making consumers, thereby giving researchers an unprecedented chance to reevaluate existing frameworks for encouraging rural digital participation. While exploring the mutual influences between smallholder family farms and digital technology, Lilith’s project is also highlighting the ways that rural regions are shaping their own digital future with their unique concerns, interests, and economic decisions.

Rafa Sattar

Rafa Sattar graduated from Macaulay Honors College at CUNY Hunter College in 2020 as a salutatorian with a BA in political science. Rafa is currently pursuing her master’s in nonprofit management at Columbia University. There, she is one of the two winners of the Excellence in Academic Leadership Award for the 2022–2023 academic year. She is also a 2022 recipient of the Diana Award, one of the most prestigious accolades a young person can receive for their humanitarian work. Rafa is founder and president of Fera Foundation, an international nonprofit that delivers tailored educational services based on the needs of the most vulnerable children. In 2020, she launched the CARE (Countering Adversity via Remote Education) Teaching Fellowship at a girls’ orphanage where she aimed to help the children prepare for their exams and procure meaningful mentors; by adapting a dual teacher system, Rafa envisioned a future where online learning could overcome barriers to educational equity. Since then, Rafa has been managing a team of 70 remote teachers from seven countries and 100 weekly synchronous and asynchronous classes at more than 200 schools and orphanages. The online classes for grades 1–12 integrate curricula, interactive resources, and teaching techniques adapted from the U.S. education system. Rafa also serves on the board of trustees of the UK-based charity, Communities Against Gender-Based Violence International. After her Fulbright fellowship, she hopes to pursue a JD in the U.S. to defend the educational rights of women and children around the world.

In her free time, she enjoys early morning runs, watching classic Bengali films, and visiting art museums.

Rafa’s Fulbright-Nehru research is exploring how innovative social interventions in West Bengal apply localization strategies to promote educational equity. Under the supervision of Dr. Devi Vijay of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Rafa is attempting to determine how community-centered approaches to social innovation in India can apply to the Fera Foundation. She is also researching community-centered approaches to organizing and also the factors that catalyze acceptance for social change in India.

Clara Navarro

Originally from Austin, Texas, Clara Navarro is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy. At the academy, Clara majored in Chinese and researched in the anthropology department where she published on the subject of gender relations in the military.

Upon graduation, Clara served in the United States Navy aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln where she was the deputy public affairs officer and principal assistant of the Media Department. Along with the crew, she completed a record-breaking around-the-world deployment from Norfolk, Virginia, to San Diego, California. Returning to land, she worked for two years as the media officer for the Europe, Africa, Central Navy Region headquarters in Naples, Italy. In this role, she coordinated communication between eight naval bases and seven host-nation embassies.

Honorably discharged from the Navy in 2022, Clara then earned a post-baccalaureate, pre-medical certificate at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., fulfilling the course requirements to apply to medical school. She is currently applying to medical schools across America.

Working with India’s National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Clara’s Fulbright-Nehru project is researching integrative mental healthcare services in the South Indian state of Karnataka. In a three-phase approach, her project is being executed first through archival research and clinical observation, then via interviews with practitioners and patients, and lastly, by reflection and synthesis. She is also assessing the hybrid practice of Ayurveda and allopathic mental healthcare that is growing in prevalence in India by focusing on both its successes and limitations, as well as on its impact on the community.