Host City USA: Mohali

Harnoor Sachar

Harnoor Sachar graduated from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service with a degree in science, technology, and international affairs, and a minor in biology. Her academic and research interests lie at the intersection of health systems and clinical medicine, and she has extensive experience conducting research in international settings. As a BSFS Summer Award, Barkanic Award, and CRF Summer Fellowship recipient, Harnoor spent two summers in Mysore, India, engaging in women’s health research, which ranged from health hazards faced by female beedi workers to health system gaps in cervical cancer care. She has gone on to present her findings at conferences such as the 2024 World Cancer Congress and CUGH 2026. Harnoor is also a recipient of the Georgetown Medical Humanities Research Fellowship whereby she has been able to bring her love for film and culture into her research interests by exploring the portrayal of motherhood in Bollywood movies.

In the clinical space, Harnoor works as a volunteer EMT in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and as a volunteer scribe at a free Spanish-speaking clinic in Arlington, Virginia.

Away from research and work, she is on Georgetown’s bhangra dance team, and enjoys singing, running, and trying out new restaurants.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar, Harnoor is expanding on her interests in women’s health and the sociocultural factors of medicine. She is conducting a mixed-methods study to examine the social, structural, and gendered barriers contributing to rising sexually transmitted disease (STD) rates in Punjab, India. Her research is exploring how stigma, gender norms, and cultural taboos surrounding sexual health and healthcare access shape patients’ and providers’ experiences with STD diagnosis and treatment, particularly among women and adolescents. Through surveys and in-depth interviews with patients and healthcare providers, her work seeks to advance cross-cultural understanding of sexual health inequities and inform patient-centered strategies for stigma reduction, improved treatment uptake, and more equitable access to STD care in high-burden communities.

Vincent DeLaurentis

Vincent DeLaurentis is a critical urban geographer in the Earth and Environmental Sciences program at the CUNY Graduate Center. He graduated with a BS in foreign service from Georgetown University in 2017. Before beginning his PhD program, Vincent worked as the director of outreach at the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent labor rights monitor focused on the apparel industry. At the same time, he developed popular education materials, and also organized tenants through the nonprofit One DC – Organizing Neighborhood Equity.

He studied and researched in Chandigarh for over a decade through two Provost’s Pre-Dissertation Summer Research grants (2025 and 2026), two Critical Languages scholarships (2015 and 2017), and an American Institute of Indian Studies/U.S. Department of Education fellowship (2025). Vincent has presented his research at several platforms: an annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers; a Global Labor University conference; an international conference of Critical Geography; and an annual conference of the journal Historical Materialism. His writing on labor and urban space can be found in ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, New Labor Forum, and the Washington Post. Vincent also practices film photography and the sitar.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Vincent is studying the ways in which visions of modernity and efforts to create a slum-free city underscore a fundamental friction in Chandigarh’s urban transformation. While the city administration mobilizes abject labor toward Chandigarh’s expansion and maintenance, the city infrastructure neglects laborers’ social and housing needs. Through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, participatory mapping, and archival research, Vincent’s project is interrogating worker intervention in the built environment, which takes place both through sanctioned and unsanctioned processes.