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David St. John

David St. John is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Riverside, in the Department for the Study of Religion. His research interests include identity-making practices, end-of-life rituals, religious and constitutional law, decolonial theory in South Asia, South Asian history, gendered and ontological knowledge systems, and religious ethics in contemporary practice.

David’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the history of Jain identity building and self-representation during India’s late British colonial period. It is focusing on Champat Rai Jain (1867–1942), a leading lay Jain intellectual of the time, who promoted the development of a universal Jain identity. For the project, David is analyzing Champat Rai’s published works, contracts from publishing houses, and other archival materials. The aim of such an analysis is to show how Jain concerns evolved into strategies that shaped the way Jain identity was legally constructed.

Shruti Sagar

Shruti Sagar received her BA in community health from Tufts University. During her time at Tufts, she evaluated a water infrastructure intervention in Haiti, taught health education to high school students through Peer Health Exchange, and facilitated qualitative fieldwork for local health departments and nonprofits about emerging public health issues.

After graduation, she worked full time at the Medical Practice Evaluation Center in Boston, MA, where she contributed to several NIH-funded cohort studies and randomized controlled trials, including one study exploring the association between air pollution and lung function among people living with HIV in Uganda, and another study on the delivery of PrEP and contraceptives to women in hair salons in South Africa. She is a co-author on multiple peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Annals of the American Thoracic Society, BMC Public Health, and Annals of Internal Medicine.

After her time at the Medical Practice Evaluation Center, Shruti attended the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to complete her MPH. In addition to her research, Shruti served as a teaching assistant for MPH courses on epidemiology, implementation science, and program evaluation.

Shruti’s Fulbright-Nehru research is examining intracity disparities in air pollution exposure in Delhi. She is conducting a spatial analysis to identify and visualize geographic disparities in air pollution exposure and sociodemographic vulnerability, and is supplementing her findings with qualitative fieldwork to explore community perceptions of air pollution risk. In order to inform resource allocation and policy development, Shruti’s project is identifying the geographic areas in Delhi that are the most vulnerable to the impacts of air pollution exposure.

Siddhant Pratap

Siddhant Pratap is a 2024 graduate of the University of California (UC), Irvine, where he earned a BS in biological sciences cum laude. His academic interests lie in neuromuscular medicine, a field where therapeutic options remain limited and clinical understanding is constantly evolving. These interests stem from his two years as a clinical researcher at the UC Irvine ALS and Neuromuscular Division. In this role, Siddhant coordinated trials across the full spectrum of rare and ultra-rare neuromuscular disease, including muscular dystrophies, peripheral neuropathies, myositis, myasthenia gravis, and ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). His portfolio spans interventional trials, including some of the first approved therapies for these conditions, and natural history studies that characterize disease progression.

Beyond his trial work, Siddhant helped establish the UC Irvine Biobank, an institution-wide translational research repository housed under the university’s Institute for Clinical & Translational Science. The biobank supports investigators across UCI’s clinical and basic science departments and has enrolled over 1,100 participants across 74 sub-investigators since its launch. Siddhant is committed to bridging clinical care and research, with the goal of becoming an academic neuromuscular physician-scientist dedicated to improving outcomes for patients with rare and underserved diseases.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a progressive, fatal neurodegenerative disease that causes loss of muscle function, mobility, and ultimately the ability to breathe. Siddhant’s Fulbright-Nehru project is establishing a comprehensive ALS registry at AIIMS, New Delhi, under the mentorship of Dr. V.Y. Vishnu. For this, he is developing and deploying a smartphone application that allows ALS patients across India to complete monthly assessments from home, as increasing immobility and travel costs make in-person follow-up difficult. The registry will generate longitudinal data on disease progression, help characterize ALS in India, and position India to host future ALS clinical trials.

Avi Patel

Avi Patel is a recent graduate of Yale University, where he studied the history of science, medicine, and public health; he also had a concentration in global health studies. His research explores how cities, infrastructure, and environmental conditions shape human health; it focuses particularly on mobility, climate, and health equity, such as the case of rapidly growing Global South cities, where climate change, pollution, and unequal access to infrastructure increasingly affect everyday well-being. Across his research and fieldwork, Avi is interested in how urban design and public policy can help build healthier and more inclusive communities. His academic and professional experiences span environmental health research, global health systems, and science communication. Through international collaboration and research, Avi hopes to contribute to more people-centered approaches to urban development and health.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellow, Avi is studying how air pollution affects physical activity and active mobility in the Delhi National Capital Region. Hosted by IIT Delhi Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Centre under the mentorship of Dr. Rahul Goel, his project is combining geospatial pollution data with time-use and mobility datasets to examine how environmental exposure shapes walking, cycling, and outdoor activity across local neighborhoods and seasons. The project seeks to advance understanding of how environmental conditions influence urban accessibility, public health, and equitable mobility in rapidly urbanizing cities. Ultimately, it aims to facilitate the building of healthier, more equitable, and resilient cities.

Aditi Mishra

Aditi Mishra is a recent graduate of the College of William & Mary, where she earned a BA in sociology with a concentration in health, medicine, and well-being, and a minor in biochemistry. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of global health, health policy, and clinical medicine, with research spanning maternal healthcare systems, community health worker infrastructure, and the historical development of public health in South Asia.

As a Monroe Scholar, Aditi conducted an undergraduate research examining why maternal mortality rates vary across geographic regions in Nepal and how community health worker-centered interventions can address structural disparities in primary and maternal care access. Her research combined quantitative spatial analysis with qualitative fieldwork, and was supported by multiple Charles Center research grants, the Tyler Center for Global Studies, and the Schroeder Center for Health Policy.

On campus, Aditi served as a resident assistant, vice president of Women in STEM, and was an active member of Minorities in Medicine and the Library Ambassadors program. She is also an alumna of the U.S. Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship, through which she studied Hindi intensively in Jaipur, India, and has since developed intermediate proficiency in the language.

Aditi’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is tracing the development of public health infrastructure in North India’s National Capital Region, examining how communities understand, adapt to, and respond to climate-related health risks, including heat-related illness, cardiovascular stress, and waterborne disease. Drawing on colonial-era medical archives alongside semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observations, her project is exploring how vaccination campaigns, child nutrition programs, and air quality policy have evolved across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and how cultural norms, gender, and economic factors shape community health adaptation practices today. Her research is also examining how historical institutional legacies and community perspectives can together inform more equitable and culturally resonant public health systems.

Pranathi Dandu

Pranathi Dandu received both her BSPH in biostatistics and her BS in neuroscience, with a minor in chemistry, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She graduated with distinction and honors as both a Carolina Research Scholar and as a Buckley Public Service Scholar, and recently completed her MS in physiology from North Carolina State University. Her academic and research interests focus on the neural mechanisms underlying sensory processing and predictive coding, and their implications for neurological and developmental disorders, particularly autism spectrum disorder. Given her background in public health and experiences in rural India, Pranathi is interested in understanding how gaps in healthcare access and literacy can create barriers to receiving effective medical care. She is especially interested in the role cross-cultural and global health perspectives can play in shaping more accessible and equitable care.

At UNC Chapel Hill, Pranathi worked as a research assistant in Dr. Hiroyuki Kato’s lab in the Department of Psychiatry, investigating the neural circuits underlying predictive coding in the auditory cortex. Her work involved neural tracing and imaging to study how the brain filters and adapts to sensory information. During her time there, she completed an honors thesis examining topographic projections from the orbitofrontal cortex to the auditory cortex; she also coauthored publications. Outside of research, she served as a copresident for the Biostatistics Student Association and was involved with the American Mock World Health Organization as a DAIS codirector. Pranathi also cofounded SPROUT Nutrition, a community initiative focused on providing nutrition education and support for underserved families, for which she received the Robert E. Bryan Fellowship. She hopes to pursue a career as a physician dedicated to translating neuroscience research into accessible, culturally informed interventions for children with neurodevelopmental conditions.

For children with autism spectrum disorder, ordinary sounds like traffic can be overwhelming and disrupt daily life, yet effective interventions remain underdeveloped. Motivated by this gap, Pranathi’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating whether structured auditory training can improve sensory adaptation in autistic children, reducing sensory distress. Working with the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, she is developing and piloting a low-cost, tablet-based intervention and collecting neurophysiological data to assess its efficacy in reducing sensory hypersensitivity and improving adaptive functioning. The findings aim to inform scalable interventions for autism in low-resource settings while advancing our understanding of sensory processing in neurodevelopmental disorders.

Amol Yadav

Dr. Amol Yadav is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Lampe Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of North Carolina (UNC) – Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University – with affiliations in neurosurgery and neuroscience at the UNC School of Medicine. He is a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist by training. After obtaining his PhD in biomedical engineering from Duke University under the mentorship of Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, Dr. Yadav honed his expertise through advanced postdoctoral training in neurobiology and neurosurgery at Duke. This propelled him to establish the Brain-Spine-Machine Interfaces Lab at UNC. His laboratory’s research is interdisciplinary in its approach, merging techniques and concepts from brain-machine interfaces with spinal neuromodulation to innovate in the field of neuroengineering. Dr. Yadav works closely with surgeons and clinicians to adapt new therapies tested in preclinical animal models into clinical applications for patients suffering from sensorimotor loss due to neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injury, and stroke. He is the principal investigator of several ongoing preclinical studies and clinical trials at UNC. His research efforts have been recognized with several accolades, including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the NIH K12 Early Career Investigator Award, the Duke Germinator Research Award, and the UNC Junior Faculty Development Award. In addition to leading an active research group, Dr. Yadav tutors undergraduate and graduate students at UNC on brain-machine interfaces and human physiology.

Dr. Yadav’s Fulbright-Nehru project is developing clinical protocols and tools for brain-computer interface (BCI) and neuromodulation trials for the Indian patient population, in collaboration with scientists, engineers, and clinicians at IIT Delhi and AIIMS Delhi. The expected outcomes of the project include a research protocol for BCI and neuromodulation trials for sensorimotor rehabilitation, regulatory filings, clinical metrics to evaluate musculoskeletal function, Indian context-specific computational tools and algorithms, and collaborative manuscript/grant submissions.

Jesse Jokerst

Dr. Jesse Jokerst is a professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). He graduated cum laude from Truman State University (Kirksville, MO) in 2003 with a BS in Chemistry and completed a PhD in chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin in 2009 (adviser: John T. McDevitt). He was a postdoc with the late Prof. Sanjiv Sam Gambhir at Stanford Radiology from 2009 to 2013, and was an instructor in the same department from 2013 to 2015. Dr. Jokerst joined UCSD in July 2015 where he leads a research program that integrates three distinct yet interdependent pillars: synthesis of nanoparticles, peptides, and small molecules; engineering of custom acoustic hardware and software tools; and human subjects research. Imaging (ultrasound, photoacoustics, and optical imaging) is the “glue” that binds these research areas together. His lab has active human subjects trials in wound care, COVID, arthritis, anticoagulation, and dentistry.

Dr. Jokerst has raised over USD 20 million to support his work, and has published over 180 manuscripts. His former trainees are at top universities and companies, including MIT, Harvard, Apple, and Intel. Dr. Jokerst has received the NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award, the NIH New Innovator Award, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Stanford Radiology Alumni of the Year Award; he is also a Truman State Distinguished Alumni Fellow. Further, he is an associate editor at ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces and former chair of the NIH study section on imaging probes and contrast agents.

Dr. Jokerst’s Fulbright-Nehru project is developing a fast, inexpensive test for active TB in rural and resource-limited settings in India. This project will generate materials science and biotechnology tools with applications beyond TB, and thus benefit U.S. taxpayers with new assays for flu, colds, and foodborne illness. For Indian citizens, it will deliver a portable, rugged TB diagnostic usable in both urban and remote settings.

Harjant Gill

Dr. Harjant Gill is a professor of anthropology at Towson University and an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work bridges ethnography, visual storytelling, and public scholarship. His research and creative practice explore masculinity, migration, media, religion, and popular culture in South Asia and its diasporas, with a particular focus on Punjab and Sikh communities. Through film and writing, he examines how intimate lives are shaped by patriarchy, nationalism, violence, and transnational mobility. Dr. Gill is the director of the internationally recognized documentary films Roots of Love, Mardistan/Macholand, and Sent Away Boys. His work has been broadcast on the BBC, PBS, and India’s Doordarshan, and screened widely at universities, film festivals, and public forums around the world. His scholarship has appeared in leading journals, including American Anthropologist, Ethnography, and Visual Anthropology Review. Dr. Gill’s forthcoming book, Coming of Age in Macholand (University of Chicago Press), offers a deeply personal ethnographic exploration of patriarchy, masculinity, violence, and migration in the Indian state of Punjab. He has received fellowships and awards from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the United States-India Educational Foundation, the Point Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren, Whiting, and Woodrow Wilson foundations. Born in Chandigarh, India, he now lives in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Gill’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the everyday aesthetics of security in contemporary urban life. Through images, objects, and built environments, it is examining how barriers, checkpoints, cameras, fences, lighting, and architectural details quietly shape public space and social experience. The project is attending to the textures, moods, and visual languages of protection that have become ordinary and familiar. It is studying how security is designed and displayed to be absorbed into daily routines, thereby influencing movement, comfort, aspiration, and belonging. The project is also tracing how ideas of safety become materialized in subtle visual forms that structure the atmosphere and appearance of everyday life.

Mudasir Andrabi

Dr. Mudasir Andrabi is an associate professor at Capstone College of Nursing, University of Alabama, with expertise in cardiovascular health, stroke prevention, behavioral health interventions, and community-engaged research. Her work focuses on addressing hypertension and cardiovascular disparities among underserved populations through culturally responsive and technology-enabled interventions.

Dr. Andrabi earned her doctorate in health promotion from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA. She has extensive experience in teaching, research, mentorship, and academic leadership. Her work integrates public health, nursing, behavioral science, and digital health approaches to improve cardiovascular outcomes and promote health equity. She has led and collaborated on multiple interdisciplinary research projects focused on hypertension management, stroke caregiving, medication adherence, physical activity, and chronic disease prevention.

Her research interests include digital health interventions, game-based behavioral strategies, AI in nursing education, and cardiovascular health promotion. She is currently developing innovative interventions that integrate blood pressure monitoring, physical activity tracking, medication adherence support, and health education for adults at risk of cardiovascular disease. She is also actively engaged in international collaborations on culturally tailored cardiovascular disease prevention strategies.

Dr. Andrabi has authored and co-authored numerous peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations. Her work has been presented at regional, national, and international scientific meetings, and has contributed to advancing nursing science and community-based cardiovascular disease prevention efforts. She also serves in several leadership roles within academic and professional organizations. She is actively involved in developing ethical guidelines for the responsible integration of AI in nursing education and scholarship. Her long-term professional goal is to advance global cardiovascular health equity.

Dr. Andrabi’s Fulbright-Nehru project is co-developing and piloting the South Asian Cardiovascular Risk Education and Digital Coaching (SACRED) program, a culturally tailored intervention designed to reduce cardiovascular disease risk among adults aged 50 and older in Delhi, India. The project is using a mixed-methods approach, and its findings will guide the development of a digital coaching intervention delivered through WhatsApp and ASCVD risk assessment tools. The project also aims to improve heart health behaviors, strengthen global nursing collaborations, and advance culturally responsive cardiovascular disease prevention strategies.