Bengaluru Archives - Page 4 of 6

Anish Bagga

As a graduate from Emory University with aspirations of entering the medical field and a passion for mathematics and computer science, Anish Bagga seeks to connect the medical world with math and machine learning. By bridging these fields, he hopes to bring a unique approach to patient care and medical research. At Emory, he was involved with the Emory International Relations Association as the head delegate of the Model UN team and also helped found Oxford’s Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Activist organization. Anish’s current research involves modeling influenza reassortment, building a computational model of the human thyroid hormone, and using machine learning to reconstruct electrocardiography profiles. His research in influenza resulted in a publication which stated that avian hosts do not stringently select against less-fit influenza A virus (IAV) strains, thus facilitating the reassortment of diverse IAVs which increases the likelihood of zoonosis. His second publication regarding influenza A reassortment ascertained that the respiratory structure within a host like swine could support increased diversity through reassortment; this he did through the construction of reassortment simulations in non-compartmentalized respiratory systems and compared its results to the data from the extensively compartmentalized swine lungs. Based on the results, it was determined that compartmentalization does not increase viral diversity; instead, it provides pockets where viruses that are less fit for swine but more fit for humans can thrive. The research helped elucidate the importance of swine in the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic.

Vaccines elicit a stronger immune response through the injection of a weakened virus which facilitates the formation of germinal centers containing a viral fragment: i.e., an antigen. In affinity maturation, B cells with B cell receptors (BCRs) that strongly bind to the antigen are selected for. These B cells secrete antibodies identical to their BCRs which bind to the viral components during infection, thus marking the virus for destruction. The more selective this process, the greater the antibody binding affinity, and thus a greater future immune response. To optimize the influenza A vaccine, a stochastic simulation of affinity maturation is also being developed during the study.

Martha Weiss

Prof. Martha Weiss is a professor of biology at Georgetown University where she directs the environmental biology major and co-directs the environmental studies program. She received a BA in geological sciences from Harvard University, a PhD in botany from the University of California, Berkeley, and postdoctoral training in insect behavior from the University of Arizona, Tucson. Her research – deriving from a close observation of nature – centers around experimental exploration of questions in insect ecology and plant–animal interactions. Her topics of investigation have included floral color changes as cues for pollinators; learning and memory in butterflies; the retention of memory across metamorphosis; and the indirect ecological consequences of periodical cicada emergences. In her teaching, she prioritizes opportunities for active learning and engagement; she believes that while thoughtful pedagogy is an important foundation for instruction in any subject, it is particularly critical in STEM fields where traditional, memorization-based methods of teaching have been known to discourage participation. Outside of research and teaching, she enjoys hiking and spending time outdoors, botanizing, foraging for edible plants, and working with fibers and textiles.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Weiss is investigating the behavior, movement, and sensory ecology of ant-mimicking arthropods in areas around Bengaluru and Thiruvananthapuram. In one of the prime examples of adaptation by natural selection, a diverse array of insects and spiders exhibit a remarkable resemblance to ants, mimicking them in both morphology and behavior, and thereby gaining protection from predators that actively avoid ants. She is also offering field-based workshops to students at Azim Premji University on plant–insect interactions; besides, she is participating in pedagogical workshops on “ungrading”, a relatively new assessment strategy that moves the focus away from testing and instead puts learning at the center of higher education.

Julia Wintner

Ms. Julia Wintner is the director of the Art Gallery at Eastern Connecticut State University (ECSU) in Willimantic, Connecticut, where she curates exhibitions, manages the visiting artist program, and teaches courses in curatorial practice. Previously, she was the director of the University of Central Florida Art Gallery, Orlando, where she developed a solid record of multidisciplinary curating and promoted the fine arts as a central and highly visible part of academic and cocurricular campus life. She graduated from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York. Her academic studies are supported by a two decades-long immigrant journey through four continents, beginning in Russia, continuing through South East Asia and the South Pacific, and concluding in North America. Her immigrant journey inspired her interest in diasporic art making. In her curatorial work, Ms. Wintner highlights the artist’s role as a cultural ambassador of the divided contemporary world; she also focuses on the development of a constituent-based curatorial model. Her research has been presented and featured in academic conferences and publications.

Ms. Wintner’s Fulbright-Nehru project is researching contemporary curatorial practices in India and how the curator’s role there has evolved over the past 30 years. She is instructing Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology students in their curatorial MA program regarding contemporary curatorial practices within U.S. cultural institutions. Her award will result in exhibitions showcasing contemporary Indian artists, curatorial exchanges, and joint classroom sessions between her home and host institutions. The project will also contribute to creating a cohort of curators who will be intermediaries between countries, cultural policies, and diverse audiences.

Ram Mohan

Prof. Ram Mohan earned a bachelor’s (honors) in chemistry from Hansraj College in Delhi; a master’s in organic chemistry from the University of Delhi; and a doctorate in organic chemistry from the University of Maryland, Baltimore. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and started his career at Illinois Wesleyan University (IWU) in 1996 where he is currently the Wendell and Loretta Hess Professor of Chemistry. Professor Mohan has taught a variety of courses at IWU ranging from nursing chemistry to organic chemistry, advanced organic chemistry, and a physical science course titled “Better Living through Green Chemistry”. Due to his efforts, there has been a significant reduction in the waste generated in the chemistry labs at IWU and also in the use of toxic chemicals; he has also been responsible for the greening of the labs. His research focuses on green organic synthesis using bismuth compounds. His contributions in this field have led to a surge in popularity of bismuth compounds worldwide.

Prof. Mohan has published 66 manuscripts, the majority co-authored by IWU students, and many highly cited. He has also facilitated the receipt of over USD 1 million in external funding. Besides, he has given over 130 talks in 16 countries. He is also the recipient of several awards, including: the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry Young Observer Award; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County 2002 Distinguished Alumni Award; the Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award; the Pfizer Pharmaceuticals Green Chemistry Award; the Chemist of the Year 2011 title; the Fulbright Teacher Scholar Award 2012; and the American Chemical Society’s Committee on Environmental Improvement Award for Incorporating Sustainability into Chemistry Education.

Prof. Mohan’s Fulbright-Nehru project is pursuing both teaching and research in India. At St. Joseph’s University in Bangalore, he is teaching a course on green chemistry, while in the research component, he is collaborating with Professor Chelvam Venkatesh at the Indian Institute of Technology Indore. The goal of the research is to develop environmentally friendly synthesis of molecules for HIV diagnosis. In addition, a lecture series titled “Better Living through the Practice of Green Chemistry” is being offered in many colleges and universities across India, especially in the rural areas.

Nitya (Deepa) Das Acevedo

Dr. Deepa Acevedo is a legal anthropologist and a law and society scholar. Her research blends ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological theory with doctrinal and policy analysis to provide new insights into legal rules and institutions. Dr. Acevedo is an associate professor of law at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her JD and PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago and her BA in politics from Princeton. Her monograph, The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2023. Her articles have been published or are forthcoming in, among others, Law & Social Inquiry, Duke Law Journal, the American Journal of Comparative Law, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the Asian Journal of Law and Society, and Modern Asian Studies. She has also guest-edited several special collections: a pair of issues in Alabama Law Review and Law & Social Inquiry focusing on interdisciplinary engagements between law and anthropology; a virtual issue in Law & Society Review on legal anthropology (with Anna Offit); and a collection on “constitutional ethnography” appearing via ICONnect – the blog of the International Journal of Constitutional Law.

Constitutions are documents for everyday life. Despite this, the study of constitutional law remains largely cabined to rarified contexts, elite actors, and written materials. Dr. Acevedo’s Fulbright-Nehru project is connecting the theoretically weighty field of constitutional law with the nuanced empirical insights afforded by anthropology to show how a diverse collection of Indian actors define, refine, and mobilize their national charter. In particular, Dr. Acevedo’s project is using the recently popular concept of “constitutional morality” to explore how ordinary citizens engage with and mobilize their Constitution.

Karen Daniels

Prof. Karen Daniels is a distinguished professor of physics at North Carolina State University. She received her BA in physics from Dartmouth College in 1994, taught middle and high school for several years, and then pursued a PhD in physics from Cornell University. After receiving her doctorate in 2002, she moved to North Carolina to do research at Duke University and then joined the faculty at NC State in 2005. In 2011–2012, she received an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship which allowed her to spend the year conducting research at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany. She has served as chair of the American Physical Society Division on Soft Matter, and as divisional associate editor for Physical Review Letters, and currently serves on the editorial board of the Annual Reviews of Condensed Matter Physics. She is also a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Her main research interests center around experiments on the non-equilibrium and nonlinear dynamics of granular materials, fluids, and gels. These experiments have allowed her lab to address questions of how failure occurs, how non-trivial patterns arise, and what controls the transitions between different types of flows or material properties. When not working with her students on experiments in the lab, Prof. Daniels likes to spend time in the outdoors, which leads her to contemplate on the implications of her research for geological and ecological systems. In her work, she has often idealized systems to provide insights into industrial and natural processes of interest to engineers and earth scientists.

In her Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, Prof. Daniels is collaborating with scientists and engineers – both at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and beyond – on the mechanics of granular materials, a class of materials such as soils, agricultural grains, and pharmaceutical powders which exhibit both solid-like and liquid-like behaviors. Her aims are to investigate the regime near the transition in those behaviors; develop new experiments which quantify the mechanisms through which the inclusion of rigid fibers modifies the material’s strength; and make flow predictions through both statistical and continuum models. In teaching IISc students, she is developing open-source teaching materials with a focus on experimental methods.

Meenakshi Singh

Dr. Meenakshi Singh is a condensed matter experimentalist with her research focused on macroscopic quantum phenomena, quantum coherence, and quantum entanglement. She received her PhD in physics from Pennsylvania State University in 2012. She went on to work at Sandia National Laboratories on quantum computing as a postdoctoral scholar. At Sandia, she worked with a team focused on developing deterministic counted ion implants for quantum computing.

Since 2017, she has been an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the Colorado School of Mines. Her research projects include measurements of entanglement propagation, phonon physics in quantum dots and donors in semiconductors, and thermal effects in superconducting hybrids. Her research work in these areas has been published in more than 20 peer-reviewed journal publications and cited more than 900 times. She is the recipient of the prestigious CAREER award (2021–2026) from the National Science Foundation. Dr. Singh is also involved in nationwide educational efforts to build a quantum workforce through curriculum development, alliance building, and workshop organization. At the Colorado School of Mines, she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in digital electronics and microelectronics processing.

Through this Fulbright-Nehru award, Dr. Singh aims to achieve research, pedagogical, and cultural objectives. The research objective is to perform cutting-edge thermal measurements that can bring new insights into our understanding of fundamental physics in quantum materials and devices and thus catalyze novel applications. The pedagogical objective is to establish a graduate-student exchange program between the Colorado School of Mines and the Indian Institute of Science. Through student exchange, she expects the researchers at the two universities to collaborate on quantum information science research while training the “quantum workforce” of tomorrow. As for her cultural objective, it involves harnessing the two countries’ shared interests in quantum information science to engage in meaningful cultural exchange.

Kathleen O’Reilly

Dr. Kathleen O’Reilly is a professor in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University and is its presidential impact fellow. She has over 25 years of research experience in gender, and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions in rural and urban India. She is trained as a feminist geographer, ethnographer, and South Asia scholar. Her qualitative research on gender norms has identified new information regarding the negative influence of these norms on physical, environmental, social, and sexual stressors related to WASH. Over the course of her career, she has sought an in-depth understanding of internal community and household dynamics when it comes to control and access to resources, like time and toilets, for women and the socially marginalized groups. Her research highlights the need to understand the complexities of social relations and sanitation policy as they pertain to spatial patterns of inequality in WASH. Recently, she created and taught short workshops on best practices for research on sensitive topics based on her ethnographic research in India. Her work has been funded by, among others, the National Science Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She has also published in such prestigious journals as Geoforum, Health & Place, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Environment & Urbanization, Water Security, and World Development.

In rural India, where conditions require women’s intensive, unpaid domestic work, it is urgent to study how it reproduces gender inequality; this will also add to the global knowledge on unpaid labor’s gendered impact. Dr. O’Reilly’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the workloads of unmarried and married rural young women; the latter living in matrilocal or patrilocal households. Despite evidence that access to leisure time contributes to women’s well-being, a large gap remains regarding young women’s leisure activities in rural India. This project is attempting to fill that gap by analyzing the gendered geographies of domestic labor and leisure. It is also making a methodological contribution by recording the work and leisure conditions of populations with low literacy through audio diaries.

Gopal Krishnan

Prof. Gopal Krishnan is a trustee professor of accountancy and the coordinator of the PhD program in accounting at Bentley University. Before joining Bentley, he was the chair of the Accounting Department at Kogod School of Business, American University, Washington, D.C. He has also taught at Lehigh University and George Mason University. He is a chartered accountant, certified public accountant, and a certified management accountant. Professor Krishnan is cited in the Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers for his teaching excellence. His research addresses issues concerning auditor independence and audit quality, corporate governance and earnings management. He has published 80 articles in accounting and finance journals, including Accounting, Organizations and Society, Contemporary Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, Review of Accounting Studies, Journal of Banking & Finance, Journal of the American Taxation Association, Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, Accounting Horizons, Journal of Management Accounting Research, and Journal of Business Ethics. His work has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Accounting Today, CNBC.com, Reuters, CFOWorld, and CFO.com. His co-authored article on a synthesis of audit-quality literature was awarded the 2016 Best Paper Award by the Auditing Section of the American Accounting Association. He was a senior editor of Accounting Horizons and holds a PhD from the University of North Texas.

Business groups (BGs) are dominant forms of industrial organization in India. For example, BG-affiliated firms account for 67 per cent of the total Bombay Stock Exchange market capitalization. However, despite the importance of BGs in India, there is a paucity of empirical research on the quality of audits of firms affiliated with BGs. Prof. Krishnan’s Fulbright-Nehru project is conducting an empirical study of the audit quality of Indian firms which are affiliated with BGs. Specifically, the study is examining whether there is a difference in audit quality between Indian firms affiliated with BGs and those that are unaffiliated (standalone firms).