Host City USA: Hyderabad

Nathan Miller

Dr. Nate Miller is a global health researcher and advisor with over 20 years of experience designing, implementing, and evaluating community health programs across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. He holds a PhD in international health from Johns Hopkins University and master’s degrees in public health and international affairs from Columbia University.

At UNICEF, where he served as global lead for community health in emergencies from 2014 to 2024, Dr. Miller led an eight-country research initiative documenting how community health workers function in humanitarian settings, generating evidence that has informed global humanitarian health policy and practice. He also led the development of South Sudan’s national community health strategy, the Boma Health Initiative, now serving eight million people, and developed Somalia’s national community health worker program guidelines for the World Bank. He has held research and faculty roles at Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University, and has worked with Save the Children, USAID, and WHO. He is the author of 24 peer-reviewed publications on community health systems, implementation science, and health in humanitarian settings, including a 2026 paper in the Lancet Primary Care on building community health worker systems ready for AI integration.

For the past two years, Dr. Miller has focused on practical AI applications in global health, advising and training organizations, including WHO, Georgetown University, and George Washington University. He founded The AI & Global Health Hub, a resource platform for global health professionals, and is leading a literature review on AI in community health worker programs.

Dr. Miller’s Fulbright Global Scholar project is a five-month comparative study across Kenya, Rwanda, and India, three countries at the forefront of integrating AI into community health worker programs. Through direct observation of health workers using AI tools, key informant interviews with those who design and run these health worker programs, and stakeholder workshops, he is documenting which implementation practices transfer across health systems and which require local adaptation, with the aim to produce open-access guidance for program managers and policymakers worldwide.

Shreeya Yarlagadda

Shreeya Yarlagadda is a recent graduate from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, where she earned a BS honors in neuroscience and psychology, with a minor in medicine, literature, and culture. During her time at UNC, Shreeya was an Accelerated Research Scholar and conducted research across multiple settings, including the Neurocognition and Imaging Research Lab, the Department of Radiation Oncology at UNC Health, and the THRIVE Clinic. She completed her honors thesis on the safety of re-irradiation for high-grade gliomas, and continues to be passionate about the intersection of the humanities and sciences, with a particular focus on quality of life and palliative care.

Throughout her undergraduate career, she engaged with, created, and led multiple student organizations. As founder of Art and the Brain at UNC, Shreeya fostered conversations integrating philosophy, art, and medicine, building metaphors to deepen understanding of neurological illness and mental health. She also founded the Global Women’s Narrative Project at UNC, creating a platform for local stories and empowering change through narratives. Shreeya is also passionate about health humanities, and had authored three pieces for the Health Humanities Journal at UNC.

A Kuchipudi dancer for nearly 15 years, she was a proud member of UNC’s classical dance team, Ek Taal. She views dance as a living connection between her culture and her identity. Seeing herself as an artist, she turns to Indian classical dances and writing as outlets that run parallel to her interests in healthcare.

Shreeya’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is investigating community perceptions about HPV-related head and neck cancers, and is also evaluating the efficacy of existing interventions in India. Her study involves engaging with underserved communities and healthcare workers to build a nuanced understanding of the stigma surrounding HPV. The goal is to identify trends in existing beliefs and guide the development of educational and interventional materials that minimize health inequities and raise broader awareness across India.

Niveditha Senthilvel

Niveditha Senthilvel is a doctoral candidate in South Asian history at Boston University. She is an accomplished scholar whose academic interests lie at the intersection of environment, indigeneity, and security/criminalization. She is passionate about interrogating the parallel processes of state enclosure upon Indigenous peoples and the environments they steward, starting from the nineteenth century.

Prior to being a 2026–2027 Fulbright-Nehru Scholar, Niveditha was awarded the North American Conference on British Studies’ pre-dissertation fellowship in 2025 for her work on exploring the usage of the word “tribe” in the South Asian context. As an undergraduate, her senior capstone thesis on U.S. intervention in the 1943 Bengal Famine won the Jesse Fant Evans Prize for Best Senior Thesis from the George Washington University. Between her undergraduate and graduate careers, she worked across the government, nonprofit, and private sectors applying her research skills to the most compelling strategic challenges facing the world.

Between 1871 and 1949, hundreds of communities throughout South Asia were categorized as “criminal tribes” by the British Indian government, and they were surveilled and forcibly transferred to “reform settlements.” Niveditha’s Fulbright-Nehru project is documenting this history of forced settlement and “reform” policies targeting Indigenous populations across South Asia, with a particular focus on such settlements and residential schools in the Madras Presidency in southern India. Through this study, she hopes to contribute to the global conversation on the rights of Indigenous peoples, environmental degradation, and the responsibilities of contemporary governments in confronting histories of injustice.

Vunnathi Ankem

Vunnathi Ankem is a community-oriented researcher and student leader. She graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, with a BS in psychology. For her honors thesis project, conducted through qualitative interviewing and thematic coding under the guidance of her mentor, Dr. Christopher Murphy, she researched how the South Asian diaspora conceptualized intimate partner violence (IPV) and unhealthy relationship dynamics. She presented this research at a conference of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) in 2025 and at the 2026 National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR). She has served as a government intern where she engaged with research produced on family violence, online abuse, and child maltreatment. She was also a research assistant in the Gender-Based Harms and Abuse Prevention Lab where she worked on projects regarding the effectiveness of intervention in IPV cases, IPV amongst international graduate students, and IPV prevention strategies on college campuses.

In her free time, Vunnathi enjoys highlighting the importance of civic action and engagement. In one such campaign, she and her team of student leaders helped raise over USD 6,000 for local Baltimore charities. And, through the Maryland Y Youth and Government program, she volunteered to support teens in their journey with civic engagement. Vunnathi has tutored elementary public school students in Baltimore City to keep up their love for learning. She has also co-led an exploration of a long-term collective civic action around health and patient care equity in Baltimore City. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Vunnathi facilitated difficult conversations regarding mental health concerns, organized multiple school events for mental health awareness, conducted counseling programs, and created space for students struggling with community issues through a mental health club she started with her friend in association with Our Minds Matter. She aspires to become a clinical-community psychologist, combining her interest in collective action, love for community work, and passion for IPV prevention and mental healthcare.

Vunnathi’s Fulbright-Nehru project is about how young people in India perceive and talk about unhealthy relationship dynamics. Working with Dr. Padmaja Gadiraju at the University of Hyderabad, she is interviewing students in a semi-structured one-on-one interview format. The interviews are identifying expectations of social behavior, the role of social networks, and the social discourse around IPV to analyze cultural influences on relationship dynamics. The findings will inform future efforts to tailor culturally relevant IPV prevention and response programs for students of South Asian descent.

Paromita Sanyal

Prof. Paromita Sanyal is a professor of sociology at Florida State University. She holds a PhD in sociology from Harvard University, an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and a BA from Presidency College, Kolkata.

Prof. Sanyal’s research lies at the intersection of economic sociology, development, deliberative democracy, and gender, with a sustained focus on how people living under conditions of structural inequality pursue agency, mobility, and collective power. Her work spans the Global South and the United States, examining microfinance and women’s empowerment in rural India, self-help groups and gender justice in India, household debt and financial precarity among working-class households in urban India, and platform labor and its consequences in India and the U.S. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in India.

She is the author/co-author of several books with Cambridge University Press: Credit to Capabilities: A Sociological Study of Microcredit Groups in India (2014), which won the American Sociological Association’s Outstanding Book Award in the Sociology of Development category; Oral Democracy: Deliberation in Indian Village Assemblies (2019); and Revolution by Stealth: How Women’s Groups Catalyzed a Cultural Transformation in Bihar. Another book, Rethinking Credit: Shaping Solutions to Social Problems, is currently under preparation.

Prof. Sanyal has held faculty positions at Cornell University and Wesleyan University, and has collaborated on research funded by the Social Science Research Council, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, and the Gates Foundation, among others. For over a decade, she was a research consultant to the World Bank’s Development Research Group. She has also presented her research at the United Nations, the World Bank, and major international scholarly venues.

Prof. Sanyal’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating how low-income communities in India are experiencing the digital transformation of finance, with the focus being on digital payment systems and AI-enabled credit. India, the world’s fastest-growing fintech market, offers a critical site for understanding the opportunities and challenges of technology-driven financial inclusion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, the study is examining how low-income publics adopt, adapt to, or resist digital financial tools, and how their responses are shaped by social, infrastructural, and moral–economic contexts. The research is bridging scholarship on financial practices and technological innovation, while informing policy by highlighting barriers to adoption, risks of exclusion, and strategies for ethical fintech design.

Sindhuja Sankaran

Dr. Sindhuja Sankaran is a professor in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Washington State University (WSU). Her research is in the nascent and evolving field of phenomics, which involves the design, development, integration, testing, and deployment of a range of cutting-edge sensor technologies to advance crop phenotype monitoring – an important component of plant breeding, crop science, and precision agriculture research and applications. The sensor technologies are used for automated, non-invasive, rapid, and continuous monitoring of plant responses to the environment and abiotic and biotic stressors on a scale previously unattainable, and contribute to addressing pressing challenges in global food security and sustainable agriculture.

Dr. Sankaran has published over 110 peer-reviewed articles and has given over 95 outreach talks. She has been successful in securing internal and external competitive grants worth USD 33 million (with USD 4.2 million going into her program), mostly from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA-NIFA) programs. She leads the USDA-NIFA Research and Extension Experiences for Undergraduates project on research and extension partnership for accelerated technology adoption and resilient agricultural systems.

Dr. Sankaran is an active member of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE), the National Association of Plant Breeders (NAPB), and the North American Plant Phenotyping Network (NAPPN). She is an associate Editor of the Plant Phenome Journal and Computers and Electronics in Agriculture. She is a recipient of the Early Career Excellence Award from the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences at WSU, the Outstanding Associate Editor award from ASABE’s Plant Phenome Journal, an ASABE Leadership Citation, and an International Society for Horticultural Science (ISHS) Medal, among others.

Phenomics refers to multidimensional phenotyping through sensing and automation to facilitate objective and quantitative assessment of crop responses. This aids in the critical process used for selecting stress-tolerant, high-performing crop varieties, cultivars, and hybrids in crop breeding programs, which is one of the key strategies in addressing issues related to food security. Dr. Sankaran’s Fulbright-Nehru project is developing phenomics-enabled decision support tools for understanding plant physiology in order to enhance the development of germplasms. Her project in India of facilitating the development and applications of phenomics tools will also benefit crop breeding programs in the U.S. and worldwide.

Rohini Iyengar Vadapalli

Dr. Rohini Iyengar Vadapalli is an art historian and an academician. Apart from research and teaching, she engages in curatorial practice. She obtained her PhD in art history from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India. She has significant experience in teaching art history courses at several universities and colleges in India and the U.S. She has also presented her research at various national and international conferences.

Her primary research focuses on regional aesthetics and the various factors affecting the nuances of regional artistic identities. A secondary area of interest is the premodern visual traditions of India. Her publications include exhibition catalogues, magazines, peer-reviewed essays in art journals, and edited textbooks on art and art history.

Dr. Vadapalli’s Fulbright-Nehru project is tracing the development of twenty-first-century visual arts in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh in India as well as New Jersey and New York in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. by drawing some compelling parallels between the living folk traditions of both the regions. The study is comparing and contrasting these two regions based on the economic-technological and politico-religious aspects affecting the arts. Her research is also highlighting the importance of AI in various art spheres. The project aims to enable the introduction of new courses on regional contemporary art and curatorial studies in New Jersey and New York, as well as courses on the “histories of regional modern Indian art” in academic institutions. It also holds interdisciplinary relevance for furthering scholarship on American regionalism studies. Further, it would provide database for art historians to conduct research both in the U.S. and India. Most significantly, this project is expected to contribute immensely to the field of art history.

Abia Fazili

Abia Fazili is a poet from Salt Lake City, Utah. She graduated in English and creative writing from Emory University. She writes fiction about South Asian immigrant and diaspora experiences, and poetry about the natural world, love and heartbreak, and anything that may inspire her. At Emory, she worked as an editor of the university’s literary magazine for several years. She is interested in the interdisciplinary application of poetry and works with cancer patients and their family members at writing workshops. Abia’s research interests lie in the history of Indian mystics and the use of Indian poetic traditions in contemporary Western literature.

Abia’s Fulbright-Nehru research project, based in Hyderabad, is studying the poetic traditions and practices of both the Hindu Bhakti and Islamic Sufi streams. Her research is identifying the techniques and elements of both traditions’ poetry and comparing them with methods used by contemporary Western poets. She expects her research and immersive experiences to aid her in writing her own collection of modern, mystic poems.

Aidan Cox

Aidan Cox, a graduate of the University of South Florida, earned a summa cum laude degree in anthropology and world languages and cultures, with a concentration in applied linguistics and French and Francophone studies. His passion lies in the worldwide preservation and revitalization of minority language. Aidan has conducted linguistic research on Telugu, French, Spanish, and other languages. He has presented his findings at English and French conferences. His focus has been on the Telugu-speaking region of South India, a unique area for linguistic study. His previous projects include “Properly Cheppu: Early Balanced Bilingualism in a Telugu-English Household”, “Pedagogy of Telugu Verb Structure”, and “A Linguistic Sketch of Telugu”.

Aidan’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is conducting fieldwork in India to deepen understanding of linguistic attitudes and social behaviors. He is integrating methods from sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and cultural anthropology to develop innovative approaches that benefit minority and tribal populations. Working with the University of Hyderabad, he is specifically exploring interactions in the Kui language among the Kandha tribe in order to examine language’s role in identity, cultural heritage, and indigeneity. He is also analyzing Kui language-use patterns, including ideologies surrounding the language. One of the aims of the project is to combat the decline of endangered languages.

Ravikumar Majeti

Dr. Ravikumar Majeti (cited as Kumar MNVR) is a distinguished university research professor, assistant vice president for interdisciplinary research, and founding director of the Center for Convergent Bioscience and Medicine at The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He is internationally recognized as a leading authority on nanomedicine, with a research portfolio spanning drug delivery, therapeutic repurposing, and personalized treatment strategies for chronic diseases.

Dr. Majeti’s academic journey began with a BSc in physical sciences from A.J. Kalasala, Machilipatnam, Andhra Pradesh, followed by an MSc in applied chemistry from SGSITS, Indore, Madhya Pradesh, and a PhD in drug delivery from IIT Roorkee.

Prior to his appointment at Alabama, he held academic positions at Texas A&M University, College Station; the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK; and the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, Mohali, India.

Dr. Majeti’s research focuses on the mechanisms of transcytosis at the intestine–blood barrier leading to the development of tunable, biodegradable nanoparticles for the oral delivery of poorly bioavailable small-molecule drugs and drug-like compounds (https://sites.ua.edu/dreamlab/). His patented delivery platforms have shown substantial efficacy in preclinical models of diabetic complications, lupus, and acute kidney injury, offering precision therapies where standard treatments are inadequate or unavailable.

As a dedicated mentor and scientific leader, Dr. Majeti has fostered international collaborations, guided the growth of early-career researchers, and spearheaded high-impact interdisciplinary programs supported by leading global funding agencies. His work has significantly advanced both the fundamental science and clinical translation of next-generation drug delivery systems.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Majeti is investigating the therapeutic promise of plant-based polyphenolic nutraceuticals through interdisciplinary collaboration at the crossroads of biomaterials and medicine. Focusing on oral bioavailability, a central challenge in the field, he is designing nano-engineered delivery systems to improve the efficacy of compounds such as Urolithin A. By integrating fundamental research with applied testing in models of chronic metabolic diseases, Dr. Majeti seeks to bridge laboratory innovation with clinical relevance. His work aims to realize the untapped potential of nutraceuticals and advances them as viable tools in the prevention and management of modern chronic health conditions.