Host City USA: Chennai

Aanya Ravichander

Aanya Ravichander is a recent graduate of Emory University, where she earned a BA in human health with a minor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. A passionate patient advocate, Aanya’s research work centers on applying narrative medicine and patient stories in care settings. She has researched the use of language as a tool for child survivors of sexual violence and worked on mental health care access for both incarcerated and unhoused individuals. At Emory, she worked with laboring refugee moms and supported incarcerated survivors of domestic violence during their parole. A particular emphasis of her work is on how sociodemographic indicators, like maternal education and the Child Opportunity Index, impact outcomes for marginalized groups.

Aanya aspires to be a compassionate physician who accords priority to patient experiences in her care. She hopes to continue to unearth areas of research in the intersections of clinical medicine and the humanities. Beyond her work, Aanya loves to play the drums, hang out with friends, work out, and explore local culture and cuisine.

Aanya’s Fulbright-Nehru research project sits at the intersection of women’s health and cultural expectations surrounding motherhood. She is studying postpartum depression and abuse in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, unpacking how community health workers and mothers respond to postnatal mental health challenges. Aanya hopes to determine the barriers to detecting, diagnosing, and treating abuse and postpartum depression to better serve the vulnerable populations. Using a mixed-methods approach, the project is analyzing both participant interviews and verified mental health scales to assess how to drive equitable, patient-centered care.

Sivani Manimaran

Sivani Manimaran is a graduate of the University of Michigan, from where she earned a BS in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology, alongside a minor in public policy, as well as a leadership certificate. She is deeply passionate about the intersection of medicine, global health, and engineering.

Sivani served as the president of Michigan Health Engineered for All Lives (M-HEAL), an over 300-member student organization of 12 project teams, each working to develop a low-cost healthcare prototype with a global partner. Sivani’s personal commitment to this mission was best reflected in her role as a colead of her own project team, M-HEAL: The Initiative. Collaborating and codesigning directly with physician partners in Kumasi, Ghana, for this project, she led the development of affordable neonatal incubator and kangaroo mother carrier prototypes. She traveled to Ghana twice to get direct feedback on the prototypes, engage with the local community, and understand cultural insights with the team members.

Beyond her research and global health initiatives, Sivani is a dedicated mentor. As a residential advisor for the Michigan Research and Discovery Scholars (MRADS), she has supported students to adjust to college and start research. Her experiences in M-HEAL, research, and mentorship have served as a catalyst for her passion to advance, advocate, and develop solutions with global communities.

To address the persistent challenges of babies with low birth weight in India, Sivani’s Fulbright-Nehru project is leading a mixed-methods study to improve Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) adherence. As part of the project, she is conducting a needs assessments with NICU mothers and stakeholders to identify cultural and logistical barriers to sustained care. Leveraging these insights, she will help develop a KMC training program for providers and family-inclusive sessions that extend caregiving responsibilities. Finally, Sivani will track quantitative metrics and caregiver comfort to refine such interventions. By focusing on these community-driven interventions, her project seeks to improve outcomes for preterm infants, thereby providing a scalable model for sustainable neonatal thermoregulation and long-term health in the Indian context.

Ethan Chiu

Ethan Chiu is a BA/MPP candidate at Yale University studying history and global affairs, with a focus on semiconductor supply chains, democratic institutions, and national security. His senior thesis, “Human Circuits in Cold War Taiwan”, draws on fieldwork across eight major chip hubs and examines the migrant workers who sustain the global semiconductor industry. After his Fulbright-Nehru grant, he will return to Yale to complete his master’s in public policy thesis, which will integrate his India research with comparative findings from his prior fieldwork in Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, Arizona, and Texas.

At Yale, Ethan founded the Foreign Policy Initiative to connect underrepresented students with national security projects, co-organized the Geopolitics of Technology Forum, and manages research on China and Taiwan at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has worked on emerging technology policy at the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. His professional experience also spans RAND, the Center for a New American Security, the Brookings Institution, and the Pentagon. Ethan has coauthored reports on AI and international security, and contributed to policy memos on supply chain security. He was also a Regeneron Science Talent Search finalist for his biomedical research.

Shaped by his Taiwanese immigrant parents and a near-fatal accident, Ethan aims to build industrial and security policies that protect both democratic institutions and the workers who sustain them. He is originally from Jericho, New York, and outside of work enjoys running, managing his residential college gym, playing the saxophone, and cooking Taiwanese food with friends.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Ethan is studying the labor conditions in India’s fast-growing semiconductor assembly, testing, and packaging ecosystem. Working with Prof. Binitha Thampi at IIT Madras, he is examining how subcontracting chains, recruitment practices, dormitory housing, and occupational safety standards shape worker well-being. Building on his prior fieldwork across ten chip hubs spanning Asia, Europe, and the United States, he is applying a mixed-methods approach combining semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observation, and quantitative analysis. He will be integrating his findings into his Yale master’s thesis to inform American and Indian policy on dignified advanced manufacturing.

Persis Naumann

Dr. Persis Naumann is a global health ethicist, educator, and social entrepreneur committed to advancing stigma-free healthcare through ethics, education, and community engagement. Originally from Chennai, India, and now based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she serves as adjunct professor in the Center for Global Health Ethics at Duquesne University. Her interdisciplinary work bridges bioethics, medical sociology, and public engagement to address health inequities, particularly those affecting women and marginalized communities. Her research focuses on infertility stigma, reproductive health, and culturally responsive healthcare, with an emphasis on ensuring that lived experiences inform policy, education, and practice.

Beyond academia, Dr. Naumann is the founder of Kelir Global and Kelir Books, literary initiatives dedicated to ethical storytelling, heritage language preservation, and community belonging. She also serves on the board of directors of the Fulbright Association India Interest Group as vice president and the Greater Pittsburgh Chapter as advocacy chair. Through her scholarship and leadership, she builds bridges across cultures while promoting concepts such as equity, dignity, and inclusion.

As a former Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Fellow, Dr. Naumann conducted empirical bioethics research in Chennai, examining the sociocultural dimensions of involuntary childlessness and infertility stigma. During that tenure, she once had the opportunity to address an audience of over 2,000 students at a women’s health conference in Chennai. After her presentation, some of the students approached her with a simple question: “Will you come to our classrooms and teach us more?” That moment inspired her current Fulbright project.

As a 2026–2027 Fulbright U.S. Scholar, Dr. Naumann is collaborating with the Department of Sociology at the University of Madras on “Advancing Medical Sociology through Ethics Education for Stigma-Free Healthcare in Tamil Nadu.” The project is integrating medical ethics into sociology education through experiential learning, interdisciplinary collaboration, and community engagement. By partnering with students, faculty, healthcare professionals, NGOs, and policymakers, she seeks to strengthen the role of sociologists in healthcare, promote culturally grounded approaches to reproductive health, and foster lasting partnerships between India and the United States. Through the project, Dr. Naumann aims to help build more compassionate, equitable, and stigma-free healthcare systems guided by her belief that “education is not just about knowledge, it is about meaningful connections, creating pathways for real-life contributions, and shaping the future workforce with dignity and hope.”

Sashi Satpathy

Prof. Sashi Satpathy obtained his PhD in physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1982, his MSc from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1977, and his BSc from Utkal University, India. After several years of postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute, Stuttgart, and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, California, he joined the physics department at the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1987 as an assistant professor, where he is currently a curators’ distinguished professor of physics. Prof. Satpathy’s research area is theoretical condensed matter physics. He has over 150 publications in scientific journals and has mentored about 20 doctoral and postdoctoral scholars over his career. Well known for a number of seminal contributions to the electronic structure theory of solids as well as to the photonic band structure, Prof. Satpathy uses both numerical and analytical tools to study contemporary problems in condensed matter physics. Recent examples are strong spin-orbit coupled systems, orbital Hall and spin Hall effects, and the physics of the skyrmions. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Physics, London.

Carrying information using spin and orbital transport, as opposed to the standard charge transport, is an emerging area of research in condensed matter physics, which has the potential to revolutionize future electronics. Prof. Satpathy’s Fulbright-Nehru project is developing a fundamental understanding about orbital transport, specifically about the orbital Hall effect, which involves transport of orbital moments. Toward this, theoretical models are being developed and the results are being validated through calculations based on the density functional theory.

Torrey Lawson

Mr. Torrey Lawson is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and educator with over 20 years of experience across national and international media. He has worked as a producer at NBC News and ABC News, and reported internationally for CGTN Digital and BBC Worldwide. He has also served as the Joan Konner Visiting Professor of Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and as the inaugural Stokes Visiting Professor of Journalism at Loyola University New Orleans, where he developed courses on digital storytelling, investigative reporting, film, and media studies, as also a high-enrollment course on sports, media, and politics. Besides, Mr. Lawson has taught investigative reporting at UC Berkeley. He is currently a Fulbright Specialist and Visiting Fellow at Fundação Getulio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro, where his research examines how digital platforms are used for recruitment and exploitation across borders; it has a particular focus on human trafficking networks, platform accountability, and the global implications of AI-driven media systems.

As a Fulbright Specialist in India, Mr. Lawson will work with students and faculty at M.O.P. Vaishnav College for Women in Chennai, leading workshops and lectures on investigative journalism, digital verification, and global storytelling in the evolving media landscape.

Samuel Aggrey

Prof. Samuel Aggrey is a distinguished research professor in genetics and genomics at the University of Georgia (UGA), USA. He holds the Richard B. Russell Endowed Chair and is also a professor in the Department of Poultry Science at Athens, Georgia.

Prof. Aggrey is a co-editor of Poultry Genetics, Breeding and Biotechnology and the lead editor of Advances in Poultry Genetics and Genomics. He has also authored numerous book chapters and over 200 peer-reviewed publications. He has trained postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers from around the world and maintains strong collaborative partnerships across Africa, Asia, and Europe.
His notable honors include the Jaap Memorial Lectureship at the Ohio State University; the D.W. Brooks Award for Excellence in Research (UGA); the UGA Student Career Influencer Award; the Broiler Research Award from the Poultry Science Association; the Changxin Chu Fund Award (China Agricultural University Educational Foundation/World’s Poultry Science Association); the Carnegie Fellowship; the World’s Poultry Science Association Siegel Research Award; and the D.W. Brooks awards for excellence in international agriculture and for excellence in diversity (UGA).

Prof. Aggrey serves as the capacity building pillar chair and as a member of the Executive Committee of the African Animal Breeding Network. He is also a member of the High-Level Think Tank on Technological Issues in African Agriculture, and contributes to the African Union’s Working Group on Animal Seed under the African Seed and Biotechnology Partnership Platform.

His current research interests include quantitative genetics and genomics of stressors (climate change and Eimeria spp. infection), as well as modeling and precision animal agriculture.

Prof. Aggrey’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the potential of polyamine-enhancing nutritional strategies as alternatives to pharmaceutical interventions in combating Eimeria spp. infection in poultry. It is integrating molecular biology, parasitology, and applied poultry science through multi-omics approaches to advance innovative health management strategies. The project aims to enhance host resilience, provide mechanistic insights into how polyamines improve poultry health, expand frameworks for nutritional immunomodulation, and develop biomarkers.

Nageswari Shanmugalingam

Prof. Nageswari Shanmugalingam is a distinguished research professor (STEMM) in mathematical sciences at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio. She obtained her PhD in mathematics in 1999 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research forms part of the foundation of the emergent field of analysis in metric measure spaces, and her current research interests include nonlinear potential theory, Dirichlet and Neumann boundary value problems in non-smooth setting, and non-local energies, with applications in geometry and quasi-symmetric mappings in non-smooth spaces, including fractals. She has more than 100 research publications in highly ranked mathematical research journals, and has coauthored a book (Cambridge University Press, 2015) on Newton-Sobolev mappings between metric spaces. She also has an extensive mathematical research network both in the U.S. and abroad. Her current research interests include the exploration of how Gromov hyperbolic geometry impacts the behavior of harmonic functions and how the dissipation of heat behaves.

In addition to conducting research in mathematics, Prof. Shanmugalingam is an educator, teaching courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels at the University of Cincinnati. She has also supervised the PhD research of six students and is currently supervising the dissertation research of three other students. She has also been a mentor to postdoctoral scholars.

The development of analysis in non-smooth spaces was motivated by the need to understand how quasi-symmetric classes of regular metric measure spaces share analytic behaviors. This development highlighted the crucial role played by geometric objects called “uniform domains”. On the other hand, recent developments in geometric group theory and fractal analysis indicate a need for discrete analogs of uniform domains. Prof. Shanmugalingam’s Fulbright-Nehru project is developing such analogs in collaboration with Prof. S. Ponnusamy at IIT Madras. The project is also introducing the field of non-smooth analysis to students by conducting a course on analysis in metric spaces.

Vanessa Botelho

Prof. Vanessa Botelho is an associate professor of broadcast and digital journalism at the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. She is also the director of the TV news and digital specialization within the master’s in journalism program. Prof. Botelho is a two-time Emmy Award-winning live television news producer. For nearly three decades, she produced hundreds of hours of live breaking news programs for millions of viewers in the largest media market in the United States, New York City. She is also a former executive producer, who helped launch a television news station in Boston, Massachusetts, for NBC. She is a visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Oxford University’s Wolfson College. Prof. Botelho is also a writing instructor for the Oxford Writing Mentors. She has received the prestigious Tow fellowship to support her historical memoir that blends her Anglo-Indian identity with her experience in the fast-paced world of live television news, as well as her family’s immigration experience leaving Calcutta, India, for Brooklyn, New York, in the late 1970s.

She received her master’s degree in biography and memoir from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and her bachelor’s degree in communication arts and journalism from New York Institute of Technology.

For her Fulbright-Nehru teaching and research project, Prof. Botelho is collaborating with Dr. Avishek Parui and Dr. Merin Simi Raj at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Chennai. She is conducting research for her historical memoir at IIT Madras’ Centre for Memory Studies. Her research is also based in Kolkata, where she was born. Focusing on the Anglo-Indian communities of Chennai and Calcutta, she is exploring the facets of identity and memory in postcolonial India. As part of her project, she is also teaching video journalism to graduate students at IIT Madras, demonstrating to them the importance of ethical journalism and how it is key to telling the stories of the underserved.

Madasamy Arockiasamy

Dr. Madasamy Arockiasamy is a professor of civil, environmental, and geomatics engineering at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) and its director of the Center for Infrastructure and Constructed Facilities. He earned his PhD in structural mechanics/engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and both his MSc in structural engineering and BE (Hons.) in civil engineering from the University of Madras. He is a registered professional engineer in several U.S. states and Canada, and is an elected fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

With more than four decades of academic, research, and professional experience, Dr. Arockiasamy has served in leadership and faculty positions at FAU, the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Anna University, and the College of Engineering, Guindy, India. He has also been a research engineer and structural engineering specialist. He has contributed extensively to institutional, national, and international professional activities, including serving as a subject matter expert for the International Electrotechnical Commission.

Dr. Arockiasamy’s research and publications focus on subjects such as structural mechanics, offshore and coastal infrastructure, bridge infrastructure systems, non-contact structural monitoring, and AI applications in civil engineering. He has authored and edited several books and proceedings, and has published extensively in leading engineering journals, including ASCE, Elsevier, and MDPI journals. His recent work includes studies on offshore wind monopile foundations, bridge deterioration modeling, and laser-based infrastructure monitoring.

He has received numerous recognitions, including the John J. Guarrera Engineering Educator of the Year Award and the Distinguished Engineering Educator Award.

Dr. Arockiasamy’s Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on a combination of teaching and research activities. The teaching activities involve co-teaching, leading, and co-organizing workshops and seminars, curriculum enhancement, graduate student mentoring, and bilateral knowledge exchange at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. The project’s research activities are focusing on the development of a geo-AI dashboard by integrating satellite data, GIS, and AI/ML techniques to address key challenges in hazard prediction (landslides, coastal erosion, and water stress), disaster risk reduction, coastal monitoring, sustainable agriculture, water resource optimization, and blue economy applications.