Gandhinagar Archives

Puja Raol

Puja Raol is a neuroscience student in the Honors College at Georgia State University, where she graduated summa cum laude with minors in health policy and sociology. She aspires to become a physician who makes community-health interventions through direct clinical care for underserved populations. As a presidential scholar, Puja has demonstrated exceptional academic achievement with sustained commitment to leadership, research, and community service. She recently received the Nell Hamilton Trotter Award, the highest student leadership honor at Georgia State University.
Puja’s clinical and community engagement centers on improving healthcare access for underserved populations. As an executive member at Shifa Clinic, a nonprofit serving refugees and uninsured patients, she has led initiatives to expand preventive care, including coordinating six mobile mammogram programs in partnership with Northside Hospital.

Apart from Georgia State University, she has had research experience at Harvard Medical School and the Emory University School of Medicine. She is a recipient of the Gilman Scholarship and several first-place research awards. Her interests lie at the intersection of neuroscience, public health, and health equity, with a focus on addressing mental health disparities in marginalized populations.

Since research in low- and middle-income countries accords priority to physical health, adolescent mental health in rural areas remains understudied, particularly in terms of affordable interventions. Puja’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining adolescent mental well-being in rural low-income areas of India, focusing on scalable, low-cost mental health interventions. The research, being conducted in Jagadhia, Gujarat, in partnership with IIPG and SEWA Rural (a voluntary development organization), is leveraging local surveyors and community alliances. It is mainly assessing and implementing community-centered strategies, aiming to develop replicable, cross-cultural models that can reduce mental health disparities in India and similar global settings.

Bopaya Bidanda

Dr. Bopaya Bidanda is the Ernest E. Roth Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. He returned to the faculty in 2021 after over 21 years as department chair. His recent books include The Business of Humanity (Routledge), Virtual Prototyping & Bio Manufacturing in Medical Applications (second edition, Springer), The Evolution of Project Management (PMI Press), and the Maynard’s Industrial & Systems Engineering Handbook (sixth edition, McGraw Hill) that serve as the definitive corpus of knowledge in industrial engineering.

Dr. Bidanda is the former president of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers and has also served as the president of the Council of Industrial Engineering Academic Department Heads. Besides, he has served on the international advisory boards of universities in India and South America. Moreover, he has had visiting professorships in Singapore and Turkey. Dr. Bidanda is also a fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers and a member of the ABET Board (of Delegates). Besides, he served on the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET for almost a decade.

He received the 2012 John L. Imhoff Award for Global Excellence in Industrial Engineering given by the American Society for Engineering Education. He has also received the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies’ 2012 Global Award for Excellence in Engineering Education and the 2013 Albert G. Holzman Distinguished Educator Award given by the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers.

Dr. Bidanda also helped initiate and institutionalize the Engineering Program on the Semester at Sea voyage in 2004. Most recently, he has been actively engaged in the Business of Humanity project in Pittsburgh and India. In addition, his Manufacturing Assistance Center initiative that provides meaningful careers to those at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid, including to convicted felons and homeless veterans, now has multiple international locations.

Dr. Bidanda’s Fulbright-Nehru project is working towards accomplishing three objectives: interact closely with the industrial engineering doctoral students and new faculty at the National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai, and throughout India via an interactive doctoral colloquium; explore the nascent field of frugal engineering; and monitor a workforce development-based research project in Gujarat. These activities are expected to further develop and hone the scholarship and research capabilities of industrial engineering students and faculty.

Srinivas Reddy

Mr. Srinivas Reddy is a scholar, translator, and musician. He studied classical South Asian languages and literatures at UC Berkeley and currently teaches at Brown University and IIT Gandhinagar. His research in South Asian studies ranges over multiple disciplines, including translation studies, history, cultural studies, and musicology, but his foundation lies in the reading and translation of classical Indian texts. He has published numerous scholarly articles and four books: Giver of the Worn Garland (Penguin, 2010); The Dancer and the King (Penguin, 2014); The Cloud Message (Penguin, 2017); and Raya (Juggernaut, 2020). His forthcoming book, Illuminating Worlds: Anthology of Classical Indian Literature, is set to be released in 2024. Mr. Reddy is also a concert sitarist and spends his time performing, teaching, and conducting research around the world. His performances can be viewed at: http://www.sankalpana.org/

Mr. Reddy’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the ways in which traditional oral repertoires of raga music were transcribed into written manuals for general instruction in late colonial India. Early texts like Maula Bakhsh’s Sangitanubhav (1888), Hazrat Inayat Khan’s Minqar-i-Musiqar (1912), and V.N. Bhatkhande’s Hindusthani Sangeet Padhdhati (1910–32) all enshrined traditional raga music compositions in fixed and printed notational forms. Mr. Reddy is revisiting this rich archive of educational materials with the critical ear of a practicing musician and a modern-day raga music educator.

William Belcher

Dr. William Belcher is a forensic anthropologist and archaeologist in the School of Global Integrative Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). He manages the UNL Forensic Anthropology Research Laboratory as well as the undergraduate and graduate programs in forensic anthropology. Dr. Belcher consults and trains in identification efforts with local law enforcement within the State of Nebraska and beyond. Prior to coming to UNL in 2019, he retired as the deputy laboratory director of the US Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s Central Identification Laboratory where he conducted forensic investigation, recovery, and identification efforts to support the US mission of missing-in-action identification and repatriation to family members. His research has been featured in numerous academic conferences in the U.S. and South Asia and in several publications.

Dr. Belcher’s Fulbright-Nehru project’s main goal is to provide a framework for building up the forensic anthropological/archaeological capacity of the National Forensic Sciences University in Gujarat. This involves three academic courses – in human osteology, forensic anthropology, and a field course in forensic archaeology – and is set to culminate in a field exercise of approximately five weeks in the north-eastern region of India associated with a U.S. World War II-era aircraft incident. Currently, there is no curriculum in the Republic of India in terms of archaeological recovery and excavation associated with crime scene investigation.