Host City USA: New Delhi

Radha Jagannathan

Dr. Radha Jagannathan is professor of statistics at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, where she teaches statistics, advanced econometrics, and program evaluation. She received her PhD from Princeton University and is an internationally recognized scholar whose research focuses on human capital development, school-to-work transitions, youth labor market dynamics, poverty, child welfare, and educational equity. A recipient of Fulbright Specialist awards to Germany, Hungary, and Finland, she is also the recipient of the Rutgers Global Impact Award, as well as numerous honors for excellence in teaching and research.

Her scholarship has appeared in leading economics, education, and public policy journals, including the Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Economics of Education Review, Cambridge Journal of Education, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Economic Analysis and Policy, Oxford Economic Papers, Social Science Quarterly, and Evaluation and Program Planning. She has also authored four books published by Oxford University Press and Bristol University Press.

Dr. Jagannathan was one of the principal architects of Cultural Pathways to Economic Self-Sufficiency (CUPESSE), an EU-funded 11-country study on youth unemployment conducted between 2014 and 2018. She also cofounded and directed the Nurture thru Nature (NtN) program, a public–private partnership among Rutgers University, Johnson & Johnson Worldwide, New Brunswick Public Schools, and the New Brunswick Education Foundation that delivered STEM educational programs to disadvantaged students from 2009 to 2022.

Dr. Jagannathan is the founding director of the Center for PASCAL Americas at Rutgers, which is part of a global alliance that advances learning for sustainable and inclusive development through partnerships among universities, governments, NGOs, and civic organizations. She currently leads an international consortium of researchers across Europe and North America on a Horizon Europe proposal focused on nature-inspired early childhood interventions aimed at narrowing educational inequities.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Jagannathan is piloting a nature-based STEM program for fifth grade students in Delhi to address persistent gaps in science and math learning, and gender disparities in STEM participation. In partnership with the faculty at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, the project is adapting and replicating the NtN model. It aligns with India’s National Education Policy 2020 and is also aimed at building host capacity and creating a scalable model for broader impact.

Praveen Arany

Dr. Praveen Arany is a trained dentist, oral pathologist, and biomedical engineer. He served as an assistant clinical investigator at NIDCR/NIH, Bethesda, and is currently an associate professor with tenure at the University at Buffalo, New York. He has six patents, over 150 scientific publications with over 12,000 citations, and an h-index of 43. His research has been featured in many mainstream media highlights in over 70 countries. He has also received numerous awards recognizing his research contributions, such as the Excellence in Research award from the World Association for Photobiomodulation Therapy (WALT), the Young Investigator award from the National Cancer Institute/NIH, the Young Investigator Award from the Wound Healing Society, the Horace Furumoto Young Investigator award from the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery, and the Theodore Maiman Award from the Academy of Laser Dentistry. He is the chair of the photobiomodulation (PBM) group in Optica and the former president of WALT, NAALT (North American Association for Photobiomodulation Therapy), and the Lasers & Bio-photonics Group of the International Association of Dental Research.

Dr. Arany has been a key figure in organizing the field of PBM. As an intramural investigator at NIDCR/NIH and in a leadership position at WALT and NAALT, he was instrumental in the adoption of the nomenclature for PBM as an MeSH term for PubMed. Among his other achievements are the demonstration of a novel PBM molecular mechanism involving latent TGF-beta 1 activation, and outlining clinical biomarkers, molecular biomarkers, treatment delivery, and dosimetry. Most recently, he advocated for procedural (insurance) codes to enable safe and effective PBM clinical protocols. This has resulted in clinical practice guidelines recommendations for treating several human diseases and promoting wellness, especially in supportive cancer care.

In India, oral cancer affects over a million people annually. Dr. Arany’s Fulbright-Nehru project is introducing the non-invasive, low-dose, and light PBM therapy for oral cancer patients in India, which has been proven to significantly improve both quality of life and quality of care.

Joris Gielen

Dr. Joris Gielen is the Eugene P. Beard Endowed Chair in Professional Ethics and the director of the Center for Global Health Ethics at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, where he also serves as associate professor. His work focuses on the ethical, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of serious illness and end-of-life care, and his scholarly interests include global bioethics, end-of-life decision-making, and spirituality and cultural competence in healthcare. His academic training covers history, religious studies, theology, and Indian philosophy. He has an MA in Indian philosophy and religion from Banaras Hindu University and a PhD in theology from the University of Leuven, Belgium.

In his international and interdisciplinary career, Dr. Gielen has conducted extensive fieldwork in healthcare in India. His scholarship includes numerous peer-reviewed publications on palliative care, spirituality, ethics, and cultural competence in Indian healthcare, with his articles appearing in the Indian Journal of Palliative Care, Journal of Religion and Health, Palliative & Supportive Care, and Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy. He is also the editor of Dealing with Bioethical Issues in a Globalized World: Normativity in Bioethics (Springer, 2020). He has taught widely in the United States, Belgium, and India, offering graduate and undergraduate courses on different aspects of healthcare ethics, empirical methods, and culturally competent care.

Dr. Gielen’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining how patients, families, and clinicians in India navigate end-of-life decision-making. It is exploring the ethical tensions between autonomy, traditional values, and legal regulations within India’s healthcare system. By using participant observation and semi-structured interviews in New Delhi, the study is developing a grounded theory to explain the dynamics when decisions regarding the end of life are made. He is also conducting a seminar series on ethical healthcare decision-making at AIIMS Rishikesh. The project aims to foster understanding of end-of-life decision-making and contribute to the bioethics discourse through culturally responsive research and teaching.

Purushottama Bilimoria

Prof. Purushottama Bilimoria teaches philosophy at the University of San Francisco. He is also a principal fellow at the University of Melbourne and the principal editor-in-chief of the Sophia journal and the monograph series, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures. Formerly, he was a distinguished professor of law and global ethics at O.P. Jindal Global University, India. He specializes in Indian and cross-cultural philosophy, global critical philosophies of religion, Indian constitutional and personal law, cross-cultural civil rights discourse, and diaspora studies. An elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, Prof. Bilimoria is the recipient of several awards and research grants, including from the United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF), John Templeton Foundation, the Indian Council for Philosophical Research, Harvard Divinity School, and Emory University’s Institute for the Liberal Arts. His recent publications include: History of Indian Philosophy (Routledge, 2019); Contemplative Studies and Hinduism (with Rita D. Sherma, Routledge, 2021); The Routledge Companion to Indian Ethics: Women, Justice, Bioethics and Ecology (with Amy Rayner, 2024); Mind, Body and Self (with Jaysankar Lal Shaw, Anand Vaidya, and Michael Hemmingsen, Springer, 2024); and Engaging Philosophies of Religion: Thinking Across Boundaries (with Gereon Kopf and Nathan Loewen, Bloomsbury, 2025). Currently, he is writing an entry article on Hindu ethics for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and also working on early Indian liberalism.

Prof. Bilimoria’s Fulbright-Nehru project is building on his extensive work on the articulation of liberalism by three great stalwarts of Indian liberalism in early twentieth-century India – Gopal Krishna Gokhale and his disciples, V.S. Srinivasa Sastri and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It is investigating the political and philosophical horizon of the nationalist trajectory, through to India’s Independence and its aftermath in the late twentieth century. The project is also focusing on a decisive reconstruction of the labors of Indian liberals toward constitutionalism, freedom, social reforms, duties, rights, and reformulation of a distinct vision of liberalism, in contrast to Western liberal theories, particularly those bequeathed by colonial masters, philosophers, and the Indian elite.

Ray Wipfli

Ray Wipfli holds a BS in molecular biophysics and biochemistry with a concentration in medicine from Yale University. In addition to his primary undergraduate degree, he received a certificate in global health studies through the selective Yale Jackson Institute’s Global Health Scholars Program. He already has over a decade of experience working in global health through his nonprofit organization, Energy in Action, which specializes in youth-targeted interventions in Uganda. Through this organization, of which he is both the founder and the chief executive officer, he has led countless public health interventions concerning sanitation and hygiene, sexual and reproductive health, and prevention of drowning. Furthermore, he has facilitated and published multiple research studies examining health knowledge and behaviors in Ugandan youth. Ray is interested in forging strong international connections to further the mission of health across the world, with a specific focus on youth and non-communicable diseases.

Ray’s Fulbright-Nehru project is to conduct an evaluation of the updated Kids and Diabetes in School (KiDS) campaign in New Delhi, India. The campaign targets the rapidly rising health and economic burden of diabetes in India, home to the world’s second highest number of diabetic patients. The research seeks to inform future health policy related to adolescents.

Rushil Vashee

Rushil Vashee earned a B.S., summa cum laude, in international political economy from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service in 2025. He was awarded the Dean’s Medal for earning the highest cumulative GPA in the school. As a part of his senior thesis, awarded departmental honors, Rushil created an original database on international lending to analyze why some countries rejected international assistance during COVID-19.

During his time at Georgetown, Rushil held multiple internships, including at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, the Edunomics Lab, and Howard University’s Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center. Rushil also spent a semester in Ecuador at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, where he was a research assistant in the Laboratory of Computational and Experimental Economics. Rushil’s time in Ecuador, shaped by conversations with his host family, classmates, and locals, deepened his curiosity about how social dynamics shape access to opportunity in urban economies.

Beyond academic and policy work, Rushil is an experienced journalist. He has published over 100 articles about the National Football League for USA TODAY Sports. A holder of a journalism minor from Georgetown University, Rushil spent his capstone semester interviewing NFL players and agents to examine the post-career narratives of professional athletes. He has also served as a senior coordinator of Georgetown Rangila, the largest charity dance showcase in the United States, with over 400 participants every year. As coordinator, he helped raise a record sum of $86,000 for a Nepali nonprofit to sponsor 300 years of girls’ education and to renovate a science lab and a school library. For his leadership skills, Rushil received the Martha Swanson Outstanding Senior Leader Award at Georgetown University.

Rushil’s Fulbright-Nehru research project investigates the determinants of digital financial inclusion in India. Using nationally representative survey data, Rushil constructs indices of digital skills and digital usage to model how individuals progress through a sequential adoption pathway from basic device access to active UPI-based payments. His analysis identifies where and for whom the largest gaps in economic access emerge, with particular attention to disparities by gender, urban-rural location, and social group. Combined with fieldwork across the country, Rushil aims to produce actionable insights on the behavioral and structural factors that shape who participates in India’s digital economy and what it will take to bring the next wave of users into the fold.

Shrea Tyagi

Shrea Tyagi received her BS from Yale University, where she majored in neuroscience with a strong focus on interdisciplinary, patient-centered research. Her academic journey bridges basic science, global health, and the arts, with a particular interest in gastrointestinal illnesses and the cultural factors that shape access to care. At Yale, she contributed to multiple research labs. In the Turner Lab, she designed an algorithm using BioPython to identify viral “cheats” in bacteriophage populations and later conducted her own experiment studying their interactive life cycles. In the Anirvan Nandy Lab, she developed a novel video-based diffusion model capable of predicting the quantifiability of each pixel in a frame. She used this model to analyze how
visual predictability correlates with gaze movement and neuronal spiking across different neural populations in marmosets.

She also contributed to medical innovation in East Africa as part of Road2IR, a capacity-building program for interventional radiology, where she led survey-based research to identify
post-training barriers and also designed new hospital documentation systems to support clinical standardization. Her commitment to health equity and stigma reduction is deeply informed by her lived experience with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). In this regard, in collaboration with IBD India, Shrea is leading a project to use Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance form, as a tool for healing and empowerment among IBD patients.

Outside of research, Shrea was the captain of Yale Kalaa, the university’s premier Indian classical dance team, and a member of both Dhvani, Yale’s Indian classical music group, and Whim ’n Rhythm, one of Yale’s senior a cappella groups. She is also the founder of the AutoKind Collective, a nonprofit focused on storytelling and culturally tailored chronic illness support.

Shrea’s Fulbright-Nehru research is examining how cultural stigma affects access to care for IBD patients in India. The study’s focus is on marginalized groups, including women of reproductive age, individuals with low socioeconomic status, and the elderly. The project aims to identify barriers to care and seeks to support culturally informed interventions in order to improve health equity for IBD patients across diverse Indian communities.

Pirawat Punyagupta

Putt Punyagupta graduated from Yale University with a BA in history and South Asian studies. A two-time U.S. State Department critical language scholar, he is proficient in Chinese, Hindi, Lao, Persian, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Tamil, Thai, and Urdu, and is presently learning Bengali and Russian. He has worked for Yale’s Program in Iranian Studies as well as the Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning. He has also conducted research for the Stimson Center, a U.S. nonprofit that aims to enhance international peace and security through analysis and outreach. Besides, he has taken part in symposia at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies. Putt has also supported heritage conservation activities. Prior to Fulbright, he was an open-source analyst in Washington, D.C.

Putt’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying the history of delimitation in India. It is investigating the process’ original design elements while examining the intentions of past delimitation commissions and their attempts to ensure neutrality. It is also studying the responses of political parties and rationales behind the federal- and state-level freezes that took place in 1971 and 2002. The project is primarily relying on archival materials housed in Delhi, but is also consulting collections in relevant regional centers such as Chennai and Mumbai. Overall, the project aims to shed light on the underlying architecture that sustains India’s vibrant democracy.

Sarah Khan

Sarah Khan graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where she majored in culture and politics with a concentration in race, caste, gender, and postcolonial development. Through her coursework, she deepened her understanding of the relationships among labor, capital, and the state with gender, desirability, and social mobility. Her senior thesis explored the construction of Muslim masculinities and femininities through techno-sex economies, wherein she analyzed the racialized nature of libidinal economies and offered a critique of Western liberal feminism. In addition to her academic work, Sarah is deeply passionate about teaching. She has served as an instructor for the Yale Young Global Scholars Program, a volunteer teacher for low-income youth in Washington, DC, through Georgetown University’s Center for Social Justice, and as an ESL instructor for newly resettled refugees in Atlanta through the International Rescue Committee.

As a recipient of the U.S. State Department’s critical language scholarship, Sarah studied the politics and poetics of her ancestral language, Urdu, in Lucknow during the summer of 2024. Most recently, she served as a fellow with the American India Foundation’s Banyan Impact Fellowship, working with the Hyderabad-based NGO Kriti Social Initiatives on the strategic implementation of economic empowerment initiatives for marginalized women.

Sarah’s Fulbright-Nehru project is using caste as an analytical framework to understand the lineage- and labor-based system of social stratification among Indian Muslims. To contextualize, conceptualize, and dismantle Ashraf (upper-caste) supremacy, her work is investigating how hyper endogamy functions as a mechanism through which caste rigidity is articulated, legitimized, and perpetuated. Through ethnographic research in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, Sarah is exploring how caste operates in and through class, educational background, and spatiality (urban/rural); she is also particularly focusing on the gendered dynamics of marriage and social mobility.

Neena Kapoor

Neena Kapoor is a third-year doctoral student in population health sciences (specializing in health systems) at Harvard University’s Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. As a member of the Quality Evidence for Health System Transformation (QuEST) research group, she collaborates with a global network of researchers to develop tools for measuring and improving health system quality. Neena has played a key role in managing and analyzing data from the People’s Voice Survey across more than 15 countries, capturing population perspectives on health systems worldwide. She has also contributed to research assessing the impact of COVID-19 containment policies on essential health service delivery across high-, middle-, and low-income countries.

Her work has appeared in multiple peer-reviewed publications like The Lancet Global Health, where she has examined user-reported confidence in health systems and quality of care globally. Neena holds a Master of Science in Global Health and Population from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a Bachelor of Science in Medicine, Health, & Society and Child Development from Vanderbilt University.

Through the Fulbright-Nehru research award, Neena is investigating the quality of care and care pathways for pregnant women with chronic conditions in India. For her research, she is building on emerging longitudinal data from Jodhpur and Sonipat with qualitative interviews of women with chronic condition, seeking to learn about their experiences while receiving antenatal care. The project is also collecting qualitative insights to provide actionable recommendations. The study aims to highlight health system gaps and user preferences in order to guide resource allocation that can improve maternal health outcomes in India.