Host City USA: New Delhi

Stuti Shah

Stuti Shah is a third-year doctoral candidate at Columbia Law School in New York. Her dissertation focuses on re-imagining crime and punishment in India through subaltern and feminist lenses. It engages in a critical rethinking of law and penal institutions that harm people and communities.

With a dual undergraduate degree in law and humanities from NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, Stuti spent three years at Trilegal, a leading law firm in India, focusing on data protection and intellectual property law. Her academic journey then took her to the U.S., where she earned her master’s in law from Columbia Law School. In the U.S., she has been a research fellow with the African American Policy Forum, Children of Incarcerated Caregivers, Reprieve, and the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School. She has also provided research assistance to Sanctuary for Families and Broadway Advocacy Coalition.

Stuti has written editorials and op-eds for reputable publications like The Hindu, The Indian Express, The Quint, The Wire, Deccan Herald, Firstpost, and Bar and Bench. Her article, “Beyond Caste Carcerality: Re-Imagining Justice in Sexual Violence Cases”, will soon be featured in the UCLA Law Review. Additionally, her piece, “Incarcerated Women and their Children in Indian Prisons”, appeared in the Economic & Political Weekly.

Stuti’s Fulbright-Nehru project is critically analyzing the experiences of incarcerated mothers – disproportionately belonging to the marginalized castes and classes – who are allowed to raise their children in Indian prisons till the children are six years old. This project is addressing the gap between existing law and scholarship on motherhood and state protection for children in prisons, and realities on ground. It is also engaging in a comparative study of Indian law and practical challenges with the U.S. model of motherhood in prisons where babies born to incarcerated women are promptly separated a year or so after their birth.

Sezin Sakmar

Sezin Sakmar recently graduated from the George Washington University with a major in anthropology and a minor in public health. During her undergraduate career, Sezin spent over 3,000 hours in various clinical settings ranging from working as an EMT and as an ED technician at a Level 1 trauma hospital to being a medical assistant at a pediatric clinic. Through these experiences, she fell in love with medicine but noticed the ways in which the American healthcare system was beset by serious infrastructural issues which led to health inequities in the case of minority communities. When studying in India through the School for International Training, Sezin conducted fieldwork with the Comprehensive Rural Health Project in rural Maharashtra, which helped her to realize her dream of becoming an OBGYN and providing empowerment-driven healthcare to communities around the world. During her final year of university, she also conducted independent research on racially concordant care among Washington, DC’s Black birthing population.

Sezin’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is bringing together the fields of public health and critical medical anthropology to make a positive impact on communities seeking family planning care. Through this research, Sezin is seeking to understand the particular ways in which healthcare providers are trained to deliver family planning services.

Ariana Pemberton

Ariana Pemberton is a PhD candidate in the History of Art department at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. Her dissertation is on ivory-carved objects from South Asia and on the Indian Ocean ivory trade, from the eighth to fifteenth centuries. Part of her research includes testing ivory objects using peptide mass fingerprinting analyses, which determine the provenance of the ivory to the species level. Ariana presented parts of her dissertation research at the Getty Graduate Symposium in January 2024 and at the University of Toronto in May 2024.

She also teaches an undergraduate course at UC Berkeley that focuses on art and material culture from the Indian Ocean World, ca. 700–1500 CE. Previously, she delivered lectures to upper-division undergraduates on “Bronze, Ivory, and Dragon’s Blood: Making the Middle Ages in the Indian Ocean World”. Ariana has also worked as a graduate student instructor in Asian Art at UC Berkeley.

In 2022, she completed her MA thesis on the Firuz Minar, a brick-and-basalt minaret built in Bengal during the 15th century, which today stands as the oldest extant monument in India patronized by an African ruler. Ariana presented this thesis at the Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Madison, Wisconsin (October 2022), and at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Honolulu (March 2022). She completed her bachelor’s in art history from UC Berkeley in 2017. She has also conducted extensive fieldwork in India and has been a student of Hindi and Sanskrit.

Ivory was one of the most enigmatic materials in medieval South Asia: religious icons were carved out of ivory; rulers sat on ivory thrones; medical practitioners prescribed ivory for ailments; men and women lay on aphrodisiac ivory beds; and ivory chess pieces circulated across the Eurasian world. However, the centrality of this material transformed it into a global bio-commodity, setting into motion an ecological process that led to the endangerment of elephants. In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Ariana is writing a longue durée ecological art history of South Asian ivory.

Kaya Mallick

Kaya Mallick is an anthropologist of religion who studies the interrelation between yoga and gender. She holds an MA in South Asia studies from the University of Washington, where she was a two-time Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellow in Hindi/ Urdu. She is also a 200-hour Registered Yoga Teacher (200-RYT) and creator of The Woke Yogi, a yoga lifestyle blog. Kaya’s scholarship largely centers around female practitioners of the Hindu ascetic traditions of yoga and tantra, but she is also currently researching the role of yoga in hyper-masculine nationalist iconographies.

Kaya is a devout scholar, teacher, and practitioner of yoga who spends much of her free time on her mat. She has been teaching vinyasa and yin-style yoga for six years, and her classes seek to integrate the psychosomatic practice of modern postural yoga with the tradition’s rich philosophical lineage.

Before discovering yoga, Kaya was primarily a playwright whose plays were staged across the U.S. and India. While earning her BFA, she discovered an inherent theatricality in the Hindu mythological texts and thus she began weaving their tales into her own. The resulting research ultimately inspired her transition from dramaturgy to sociocultural anthropology. However, despite her disciplinary shift, Kaya continues to tell stories – on the stage and in the yoga studio.

With the Fulbright-Nehru research grant, Kaya is conducting an ethnography of Hindu women who lead ascetic lifestyles (sādhvīs/saṃnyāsasinīs/yoginīs). Through participant observations and interviews, she is studying how and why Hindu women practice asceticism in uniquely gendered ways and how their ascetic practices impact their lives both materially and metaphysically.

Mohnish Judge

Mohnish Judge is a Tibetan Indian American graduate of Oregon State University with a major in economics and minors in religious studies and linguistics. He is interested in the intersections of language, cultural identity, and political advocacy. As an undergraduate, he conducted research on Tibetan honorifics as part of his honors thesis, founded and led the Himalayan Student Association on his campus, and worked to provide low-income housing in his community.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Mohnish is investigating the mechanisms through which media functions, connects, and interacts with the Tibetan diaspora communities. Using a linguistic and communicative lens, he is examining the production and consumption of the media created by the Tibetan government-in-exile by conducting interviews and surveys, and through discursive and rhetorical analyses. The aim is to contribute to the current scholarship surrounding media, diaspora studies, imperialism, and cultural preservation.

Isabel Huesa

Isabel Huesa graduated summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis with a BA in anthropology, global health, and the environment, and minors in biology and South Asian languages and cultures. She wrote her senior honors thesis on the history of fossil fuel divestment campaigns at higher education institutions. A proud alumna of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Isabel’s interests lie at the intersection of social justice, the environment, and health disparities. She dedicated her undergraduate career to understanding disease impact and harm reduction in marginalized communities; expanding student mental healthcare access; fighting for social justice; and examining Washington University’s role within the greater St. Louis. An advocate at heart, Isabel has mentored students as a mental health peer counselor, advised university leadership as the undergraduate representative to WashU’s Board of Trustees, and – in the wake of Missouri’s statewide abortion ban – led outreach efforts for Planned Parenthood. A critical language scholar, Isabel spent over six years learning Hindi. As a climate justice advocate, Isa participated in the United Nations’ 28th Conference of the Parties and also worked as a student consultant in the Interdisciplinary Environmental Law Clinic at WashU Law.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Isabel is in Delhi studying mental telehealth interventions in the HIV care continuum. She is evaluating and analyzing the efficacy of the existing 24/7 NACP (National AIDS Control Program) phone counseling service by examining the frequency of use by MSM (Men Who Have Sex with Men), the perceived effects of the phone counseling, and the patterns of HIV transmission and treatment in Delhi among MSM before and after such counseling.

Joseph Edmundson

Joseph Edmundson graduated from the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service in May 2022 with a BS in international economics with minors in mathematics and international development. His academic interests include rural and agrarian economic development with a focus on environmental, health, and economic externalities. Joseph’s first exposure to India was in December 2019 when he traveled to New Delhi on a two-week immersion trip to collect local experiences and perspectives on water utilization. Leaving the country with a profound desire to continue engaging with and working in India, he spent the remainder of his undergraduate years investigating rural Indian economic initiatives. This culminated in his honors thesis on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act’s theoretical impact on wage dynamics.

During his undergraduate years, he was also involved with nonprofit consulting. Following his graduation, Joseph spent two years with Goldman Sachs Public Global Banking and Markets Division in New York City.

In India, Joseph is excited to spend his free time continuing to develop his yoga practice as well as learn new culinary techniques, two of his favorite hobbies. Joseph also enjoys playing the tenor saxophone and piano, and is an avid art museum goer. Besides, he has performed as a dancer in Georgetown’s Rangila, an annual South Asian dance recital fundraiser.

In his Fulbright-Nehru project, Joseph is researching the implementation of two technology-based agrarian market interventions, the National Agriculture Market (eNAM) and AgMarknet; eNAM is a pan-India online trading platform for agricultural commodities with the goal of enabling large-scale market integration, while AgMarknet is an initiative to collect, analyze, and disseminate market information to agricultural market stakeholders. In his project, specifically, he is examining where these interventions have been successful and the kind of barriers they had faced; he is also studying the initiatives’ market efficiencies; besides, he is looking at the environmental and economic externalities brought about by these initiatives, including in terms of decision-making related to cropping practices and patterns over time.

Yash Deo

The American Psychological Association defines depression as a deep-seated illness marked by sadness and loss of interest in activities. Its impact was deeply felt by Yash Deo when his grandfather was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Yash then played a significant role in his grandfather’s care, taking on daily responsibilities such as bathing him, changing his clothes, and cooking for him. This experience piqued Yash’s interest in the psyche/neuro side of science, prompting him to take a psychology course in high school. There, he was introduced to concepts like neuroplasticity, which reshaped his understanding of the brain’s adaptability quotient. Motivated by these insights, he pursued a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and worked in Dr. Matthew Cooper’s behavioral neuroscience lab. His studies and lab work deepened his knowledge of the neurobiological mechanisms behind disorders like depression. Outside of the classroom, Yash was active in the neuroscience community at the University of Tennessee, serving as a neuroscience ambassador and holding leadership roles in several university neuroscience organizations. He developed key organizational and team-building skills and launched the Neuro-Tools Series, providing practical neuroscience-based tools on topics such as sleep, focus, and motivation. These experiences have led Yash to aspire to a career in interventional psychiatry, where he aims to use specialized neuromodulatory techniques like transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to alleviate the burdens of mental and neurological disorders. His goal is to enable individuals to engage meaningfully with their communities without the constraints of their symptoms; the focus is particularly on treating depressive and anxiety disorders to restore normalcy and joy to their lives.

The research, divided into three phases of preparation, treatment, and analysis, is utilizing advanced techniques like fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy), EEG (electroencephalography), and cognitive testing. Yash’s extensive lab experience and Dr. Verma’s expertise aim to enhance treatment strategies for severe urban mental health crises.

Sadie Cowan

Sadie Cowan graduated from Boston University (BU) School of Public Health, Massachusetts, in 2024 with a master’s in public health, concentrating in global health policy. Sadie received her bachelor’s in sociology with honors from BU in 2022. She is originally from Dalton, Georgia, where her love for social sciences and public health began through experiences in electoral politics – a passion she continued for several campaign cycles in Georgia, Massachusetts, and nationally. Sadie’s social science research, among which includes a study regarding gender-affirming care for transgender inmates in the Georgia Department of Corrections Facilities, has been published by Johns Hopkins University and featured by Boston University’s Undergraduate Research Program. Her academic interests include global development, strengthening of health systems, LGBTQIA+ health, comparative health systems, and healthcare access for marginalized populations. Outside of academics, Sadie enjoys distance running, hiking, and exploring new cuisines.

Achieving the World Health Organization’s Tuberculosis (TB) Elimination Goals necessitates rapid reductions in TB incidence and mortality, particularly in India, which bears a quarter of the global burden. Aside from diagnostics, the Indian government has introduced nutritional subsidies for persons with TB through the Ni-kshay Mitra program. While the program has benefited hundreds of thousands of Indians with TB, there’s an urgent need to enhance its uptake. Sadie’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying the impact of Ni-kshay Mitra subsidies on their recipients; it is also examining the motivational factors behind donors participating in the program. Besides, the project is exploring ways in which Ni-kshay Mitra can enhance access to public-sector TB facilities.

Chandler Compton

Chandler Compton is a North Carolina native raised on his family’s farm near Chapel Hill. At Wofford College, he majored in international affairs and English, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He played on the men’s soccer team while also serving the college’s honor council and tutoring students at the library’s writing center. As a junior, he directed and hosted the college’s first-ever TEDx conference. He has also studied in Prague, Czechia.

After college, Chandler served as a logistics officer in the United States Marine Corps. Stationed at both Mount Fuji and Okinawa, Japan, his role involved leading the Marines in logistics operations and collaborating with partners across the Indo-Pacific region. His firsthand experience working in this dynamic international environment solidified his interest in international affairs and regional cooperation.

Chandler enjoys traveling to new countries, reading history, and going snowboarding whenever possible. He is a passionate supporter of the Atlanta Braves and Everton Football Club. When not following sports or being with friends, he is likely to be found at the gym or playing pick-up sports at the nearest basketball court or soccer field.

Chandler’s Fulbright-Nehru research is focusing on India’s potential leadership role in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) to strengthen Indo-Pacific supply chains. His project is identifying collaborative strategies for Quad members to build resilient multilateral supply chains in the region. Considering India’s strategic location, growing economic influence, and access to critical trade routes, Chandler argues the country is uniquely positioned to spearhead the Quad leadership in fortifying the Indo-Pacific economic infrastructure and promoting regional stability and sustainable development while mitigating the impact of disruptions in the global economy.