Host City USA: New Delhi

Abhiyudh Rajput

Abhiyudh Rajput (they/them/theirs) holds a BS in environmental health and a BA in cultural anthropology from the University of Rochester. Professionally, they are experienced in clinical, qualitative, and wet-lab research, with a paper published on a potential therapy for diabetes. Studying a medical treatment led Abhiyudh toward the path of preventive health as they felt they could have a greater impact on creating conditions that prevent diseases. This realization, combined with their fields of discipline, led Abhiyudh to study urban planning as they began to realize how much of one’s health is determined by the design and layout of their city; for example, street design dictating whether one walks or drives, thus impacting exercise levels, mental health, and likelihood of injury.

Abhiyudh’s interest in India stems from their heritage as well as their exploration of cultural phenomena such as nation-building, caste, and personhood through their anthropology degree. This degree coursework culminated in a senior project that explored how Indian films create a collective narrative around the communal unrest caused by the Partition. They hope to apply this appreciation for human subjectivity and cultural forces in their personal and professional life. Beyond critically exploring their culture, Abhiyudh has engaged with India through their involvement with the community-based health organization SOVA in Odisha. During their four years as an undergraduate, they developed a strong relationship with the SOVA community and assisted with fund-raising for programs such as adolescent reproductive health education and computer literacy.

Aside from academics, Abhiyudh is interested in music, films, and photography. In their free time, they enjoy being creative, making mashups of songs, taking photographs of streetscapes and friends, and concocting recipes that blend cultures. They enjoy exploring cities, both familiar and unfamiliar, eating their way through New York City’s Chinatown or taking a solo trip to Mexico City to practice Spanish.

Abhiyudh’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying the impact of increasingly automobile-centric built environments in Delhi on the safety of pedestrians and the subjective impacts on their mobility. In this context, 50 pairs of roadways are being analyzed via a matched case-control study design, measuring quantitative and qualitative data related to pedestrian safety and comparing it to the actual historical safety of these roadways. Overall, this project seeks to understand what can make Delhi’s roadways safer for its most vulnerable users and how can future pedestrian deaths and injuries be prevented.

Ribhav Gupta

Ribhav Gupta is a medical student (MD) at the University of Minnesota and is currently on leave from his final year due to research affiliations with Stanford, UCSF, and Yale. He received both his bachelor’s degree (with honors) in biomechanical engineering and master’s degree in infectious disease epidemiology from Stanford University. Ribhav’s areas of research bridges machine learning, public policy, and public health to model global health policy decisions for equitable infectious disease care.

His work has been funded by the Gates Foundation and the WHO. Notably, his work on modeling optimal pediatric typhoid vaccination guidelines informed new global standards and his early work characterizing Covid-19 epidemiology garnered national attention and has been cited hundreds of times. His research has yielded textbook chapters and over a dozen peer-reviewed articles published across highly regarded journals, including The Lancet.

Presently, Ribhav is focused on studying Covid-19 and other infectious diseases transmitting amongst detained migrant populations. He is also part of multiple national research teams that advises on hepatitis A vaccination guidelines. With a passion for health policy, he is in multiple state advisory bodies, including those for firearm safety and suicide prevention and for obstetrics and family planning for arriving refugees.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Ribhav served as an epidemiologist at the UN and across multiple municipal government agencies. Additionally, he advised the development of a Covid-19 model for the incarcerated populations adopted by 49 states amidst the pandemic. Beyond research, being a former Biodesign NEXT Fellow, he has an interest in med-tech innovation.

When outside the hospital, Ribhav can be found exploring outdoor trails on runs; rock climbing; venturing to new cafes; and experiencing what cities have to offer.

Ribhav’s ultimate aspiration is to pursue a career in academic medicine and global health diplomacy to promote equity and quality of care for marginalized populations.

In 2021 alone, nearly 11 million people were diagnosed with TB, with one in four of them living in India. Despite progress, difficulties in detecting drug resistance have limited the impact of interventions, with one in five of them now resistant to first-line antibiotics. As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Ribhav is computationally modeling cost-effective health policies to reduce TB transmission and resultant mortality using a novel, point-of-care multi-drug-resistance diagnostic platform developed at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. His work has direct tuberculosis policy applications within India and can inform global changes.

Eshan Gupta

Eshan Gupta is a recent graduate from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. He graduated with a BS in science, technology, and international affairs with an emphasis on energy and environmental issues. During his time at Georgetown University, he worked on clean-energy procurement for a private-sector consulting company and was also involved in various climate-related government initiatives in the legislative and executive branches. Eshan has extensive experience in international development, both on the funding and implementation sides. He is excited to begin the next chapter of his professional and academic journey with this Fulbright grant to India which he sees as a culmination of his academic and professional experiences thus far, allowing him to explore his research interests, while also expanding his knowledge about the fast-growing clean-energy field.

In his free time, Eshan enjoys singing, Bollywood dancing, and biking.

Eshan’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is working towards understanding why the current deployment of solar microgrids in rural India has not yielded the clean-energy and economic impacts that were promised. In order to study the several educational, social, and technological barriers to solar microgrid usage, Eshan is conducting interviews and policy analysis with various communities to understand how the government can better support rural deployment of solar microgrid to maximize usage; he is also examining the positive developmental and technological outcomes associated with solar power.

Mary Girard

Between 2013 and 2022, Mary Girard visited India – where she grew up (1959–1976) – to research her family’s story in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. She wrote a biography, Among the Original Dwellers: Remembering Ferdinand Hahn (Lulu, 2019), about her great-great-grandfather who went from Germany to British India to work among the Adivasis (tribes) in the plateau jungle region of Chotanagpur; Ferdinand Hahn was a pastor, administrator, educator, ethnologist, linguist, and historian, but it was his fascination with volksgeist (the spiritual essence of a people) that inspired him to collect folktales of the Oraon tribe and write a grammar of their language.

Mary discovered that there was a keen interest among the Adivasis she met as to how she accessed her ancestral story. While she had only some family stories, she found a great deal in archived materials in Germany and around the world. Realizing that such archives do not exist for much of Adivasi history, she started a series of writing workshops to explore how to spark memories and tell everyday stories that become building blocks for historical narratives. This storytelling project was written up as “The Journey of Discovering and Preserving Heritage” in the Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies (2019).

Mary graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and continued to maintain her interest in South Asian history as an independent scholar while working in the nonprofit sector. Throughout her work history, she has relied on the power of storytelling. She has collected whatever literature she could access to research for a novel that would tell a story about the nature of the cross-cultural relationship between the Adivasis and her ancestors. Mary is an avid traveler and enjoys blogging about her travels and journey as a writer.

Anmol Ghavri

Anmol Ghavri is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a 2023-2024 US Fulbright-Nehru Scholar affiliated with the Centre for Historical Studies at JNU. He focuses on the history of modern South Asia as well as global histories of capitalism, political economy, and economic life. He is especially interested in the history of India’s modern market economy and society. At Michigan he has been an instructor in courses covering all periods of South Asian history. His Fulbright and doctoral research is on the history of vernacular capitalism and enterprise of agrarian communities in north India adapting to the uneven economic transformations of the twentieth century. It seeks to pluralize our understanding of the lineage of capitalism and the institutions, contradictions, and contestations characteristic of modern India’s economy. He received his BA in History from Dartmouth College with High Honors in 2018 and master’s degrees from Columbia University and the London School of Economics in 2020.

Brock DeMark

Brock DeMark is a PhD student at Indiana University (IU), Bloomington, studying modern Indian history, British colonial/imperial history, and urban development. Before his doctoral coursework, Brock lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he completed his bachelor’s degree in history and English literature at the University of Arkansas in 2019. At IU, Brock has served as the leader of its History Department’s Graduate Student Association. He organized a national conference for history graduate students in Bloomington in 2022. Brock is also active in IU’s Dhar India Studies Program, practicing his Hindi at weekly conversation table meetings, attending Hindi and Urdu movie events, and composing poems in Hindi. Besides, Brock spent the summer of 2022 in Jaipur, India, studying Hindi under the Critical Language Scholarship Program.

Brock’s dissertation research is an urban history project that examines the “fabrication” of Kanpur, India – a global industrial hub – in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The word “fabrication” denotes both “invention” and a “process of constructing, fashioning, and manufacture”. Attentive to the ways in which Kanpur was “fabricated” in both senses of the word – how it was invented as a place that people would be interested in going to find work or investing money, as well as the processes and relationships that led to the construction of the city’s material infrastructure – Brock’s project seeks to make a unique contribution to the scholarly understandings of habitability and community-formation during the colonial period. Brock’s dissertation is drawing on written sources in English and Hindi located in the libraries and archives of Kanpur, Lucknow, Delhi, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

When he is not researching, writing, or reading about Indian history, Brock enjoys hiking, playing basketball, reading popular astronomy articles, and drinking lassi with his partner, Savannah.

Brock’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the growth and development of Kanpur from 1870 to 1930. The primary goal is to understand how uneven relationships of power between European industrialists, municipal officials, and Indian residents shaped the design of the city. A relatively small commercial mart and military depot that expanded rapidly during the first few decades of the Crown rule, Kanpur grew up alongside the colonial state itself. As such, Kanpur offers a unique insight into the discrepancies between what the colonial state claimed about its development projects versus their impact on the everyday life of Indian residents.

Lainie Beauchemin

Lainie Beauchemin earned a BS in biological engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she researched the molecular underpinnings of schizophrenia and other neurological diseases through the Broad Institute. During her time at MIT, Lainie was co-president of a math mentorship program for underserved middle school girls in the Cambridge/Boston area, and worked in various roles for The Educational Justice Institute, including teaching Python to incarcerated women. She was also chair of the MIT Shakespeare ensemble as well as an actress, producer, and designer for multiple productions. Since her graduation, Lainie has been researching chronic lung diseases. She plans to pursue a PhD in biomedical engineering and hopes to work on expanding healthcare access globally.

Lainie’s Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on broadening neurological diagnostic care in rural India, in conjunction with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and Project Prakash. She is assessing the need and feasibility of a system of mental and neurological health clinics in rural India in order to pave the way for more accessible healthcare in these specialties. She is also working with her collaborators to enable the establishment of clinics which are local and accessible to villagers in the state of Uttar Pradesh. At these clinics, patients would receive screening for neurological illnesses, their data could be sent to providers in New Delhi, and prescription medicine could be sent back to the clinics, all at no cost to the villagers. Before such a system can be devised, there is a wealth of preliminary feasibility research to be conducted concerning the areas of need, the obstacles facing the villagers, the regulatory logistics of dispensing prescription medication and treatment, and the sourcing of medical equipment and personnel.

John Portz

Prof. John Portz is a professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. His research interests include education policy, federalism, and institutional leadership, and his teaching areas cover urban politics, intergovernmental relations, public policy, and public administration. In one major research project, he joined a team of scholars analyzing the development of civic capacity in support of public education in major U.S. cities. Based on this project, he co-authored City Schools and City Politics: Institutions and Leadership in Pittsburgh, Boston, and St. Louis (University Press of Kansas, 1999). Focusing on leadership, in another co-authored project he worked with a colleague to identify and explore six common practices of leader-managers in the public sector (Leader-Managers in the Public Sector: Managing for Results, M. E. Sharpe, 2010). More recently, he has focused on educational governance and accountability in K-12 education. Of particular interest are variations in how accountability is achieved, depending upon the institutional setting: administrative, market, professional, and political. Each setting offers a different accountability design. In addition, these designs vary across American federalism based upon different perspectives or lenses at the national, state, and local levels. This project led to a recent publication of his, Educational Accountability and American Federalism: Moving Beyond a Test-Based Approach (Routledge, 2023). In addition to his research activities, Prof. Portz has served at Northeastern University as chair of the Political Science Department and director of the University Honors Program. Outside of academia, he has served as an elected member of his home community’s school board and city council.

In his Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Portz is combining teaching, advising, and research. This includes giving guest lectures on special topics in American politics and policymaking, providing guest presentations in classes, and advising students on research projects. The political and policy dynamics of federalism in the U.S. and India is of particular interest. The research component of his project is an extension of his recent work on educational accountability, focusing on the dynamics of accountability at the elementary and secondary education levels (up to age 18) in India in comparison to the U.S.

Dharmendra Saraswat

Dr. Dharmendra Saraswat is an associate professor in the Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE) Department at Purdue University. He received a bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering from Sam Higginbottom Institute of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences (SHUATS); a master’s degree in agricultural engineering from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi, and a PhD in food, agricultural, and biological engineering from The Ohio State University.

Before coming to Purdue, Dr. Saraswat was a faculty member at the University of Arkansas, a scientist at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, New Delhi, and an assistant professor at Chandra Shekhar Azad University of Agriculture & Technology, Kanpur.

Dr. Saraswat conducts research in information technology for agriculture. He has been pursuing two areas of emphasis within agriculture: watershed modeling; and digital agriculture. He applies engineering and science principles to measure, model, and develop digital solutions. Dr. Saraswat’s research demonstrates the application of GIS, remote sensing, and open-source software for creating new technologies, decision-support tools, and data sets to manage the environment and agricultural production systems.

Dr. Saraswat’s overall research and extension efforts have been recognized on a sustained basis. He has received several awards, including the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award (2023), Excellence in Multistate Research Team Award from USDA-NIFA for the S1069 project (2022), Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award from Purdue ABE (2022), Outstanding Educator Award by SHUATS (2021), the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers’ (ASABE) ITSC Best Paper Award (2019), ASABE Standards Award (2018), ASABE Educational Aids Blue Ribbon Award (2017, 2015, and 2013), the American Society of Horticultural Sciences’ Outstanding App Award (2016), Southern Region-American Society of Horticultural Sciences’ Blue Ribbon Extension Communication Award (2016 and 2012), the Fellow of Indian Society of Agricultural Engineers (2014), John W. White Outstanding Extension State Faculty Award by the University of Arkansas (2014), and Excellence in Remote Sensing and Precision Agriculture Award from the National Association of County Agricultural Agents (2013).

Dr. Saraswat’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is focusing on applying deep learning methods to identify and study the spread pattern of bacterial blight in rice and develop a conceptual modeling framework for creating an early warning system. Besides, Dr. Saraswat is collaborating with colleagues at IARI to share experiences with curriculum design and classroom delivery for spatial data science courses to augment the existing curriculum for developing students’ analytical, problem-solving, computational, and decision-making skills and abilities.

Mary Rader

Ms. Mary Rader is currently the South Asian studies librarian and the head of the Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team at the University of Texas (UT) Libraries. She received her BA in art history from Kalamazoo College, her MA in international studies (with a South Asia focus) from the University of Washington, and her MLS from the University of Texas; throughout all three programs, she conducted language training in Tamil and Hindi/Urdu and was an American Institute of Indian Studies Language Fellow (Tamil) as well as a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow (Hindi).

Before coming to UT, Ms. Rader held similar positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Michigan, and Chicago Public Library. As a South Asian studies librarian, her work inherently focuses on content from and about all South Asian countries, in all formats, in all disciplines, and in all South Asian languages. Finding collections that have hitherto been ignored or hidden and making them publicly available is a particular focus of her efforts. A national leader in cooperative collection development efforts for South Asian studies, she regularly partners with the South Asian Materials Project (SAMP), the South Asian Open Archives (SAOA), and other collaborative initiatives.

Ms. Rader’s project is seeking and documenting “Hidden Archives” in Delhi and in Chennai. The goals are to locate personal and private archives housed outside of academic and public domains and to document the content and condition of these collections. The study is setting the groundwork for future preservation and discovery of these materials. Beyond traditional deliverables (publications, grant proposals, bibliographic tools), this research will deepen networks for future and ongoing inter-institutional and international relationships between collectors, scholars, and librarians of South Asia.