Host Institution India: Harvard University

Mir Sumira

Dr. Mir Sumira works as Project Scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad’s Centre for Godavari River Basin Management and Studies in the Department of Civil Engineering. Her expertise lies at the intersection of disaster risk reduction, climate resilience, and sustainable development, built on years of field research in Jammu & Kashmir. An MSc gold medalist in disaster management (2015–2018), she completed her PhD in the subject from the University of Kashmir (December 2024). She was selected as a CDRI Fellow (Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure), 2023–2024 Cohort, where she designed and implemented protocols to strengthen systemic disaster resilience in mountainous regions by institutionalizing multi-stakeholder networks, processes, and mechanisms. She has certified training in geospatial technologies and applications from the Department of Space at National Remote Sensing Centre, ISRO. Her work reflects a strong commitment to bridging scientific research, community resilience, and policy innovation, with the aim of fostering disaster-resilient and climate-adaptive societies.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellow, Dr. Sumira is working on developing a digital land resilience model, a GIS-based computational tool designed for rapidly urbanizing Himalayan cities such as Srinagar. It integrates multi-hazard assessments, climate change projections (CMIP6), urban growth models (CA–Markov, SLEUTH), and policy simulations (agent-based modelling) to identify risk hotspots and test nature-based vs engineered solutions. The final goal is to develop a scientifically validated, policy-ready resilience model that helps Indian mountain cities make climate-adaptive decisions. Working with US experts allows Dr. Sumira to bring cutting-edge digital resilience planning to the Himalayas.

Raju Manjali Rhee Johnson

Dr. Raju Manjali Rhee Johnson is an award-winning pharmaceutical physician and med-tech innovator, currently leading the Kerala Genome Data Centre, a flagship genomics program under the Kerala Development and Innovation Strategic Council. His work focuses on leveraging genomics and digital health to enable population-scale public health transformation and economic development.

Dr. Raju began his career in pharmaceutical medical affairs before moving into strategy and leadership roles across digital health and med-tech. He has held key positions at Wolters Kluwer, supporting clinical decision systems across South Asia. He also served at Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, where he worked on advancing digital therapeutics and medical technologies. Dr. Rhee actively mentors and advises incubators, accelerators, and over 50 startups in healthcare and technology.

Beyond healthcare, Dr. Raju is a storyteller and creative practitioner. He has hosted a solo photography exhibition at Mumbai’s Jehangir Art Gallery. A sought-after speaker, he has delivered talks at more than 500 scientific forums and has also been featured at prominent literary platforms such as the Kerala Literature Festival, Global
AI Summit and other major management and tech conferences. He has authored multiple articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and contributed to national newspapers, shaping conversations at the intersection of healthcare, technology, and public policy.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow at Harvard University, Dr. Raju is pursuing a master’s in public health. His goal is to integrate med-tech innovation, genomics, and policy to design scalable, equitable public health solutions for India and other emerging economies.

Pratiksha Sanjay Basarkar

Ms. Pratiksha S. Basarkar graduated with a BA LLB (Hons) from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore in 2018, where she was awarded the Heyning-Roelli Foundation Scholarship to attend a semester at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Since graduation, Pratiksha has worked as a litigation lawyer across roles. She began her career at a major law firm before joining Project 39A (now The Square Circle Clinic, NALSAR University of Law), a criminal justice organization. Here she led teams providing pro bono legal representation to persons sentenced to death before the Supreme Court of India and various High Courts, contributing to several acquittals and commutations of sentences. She has facilitated mitigation investigations and worked on strategic litigation addressing broader issues in the criminal justice system, such as unreliable forensic evidence and mental healthcare in prisons. Beyond litigation, she has written on new criminal laws and engaged with stakeholders including social workers and policy researchers through training and discussions.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Pratiksha is pursuing an LLM at Harvard Law School. She is studying comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to criminal law and systemic reform, with a focus on wrongful convictions, to inform litigation and reform efforts in India.

Blesson Mathew

Mr. Blesson Mathew is a governance and public policy professional working at the intersection of policy, diplomacy, and international development. A graduate of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, with a degree in English and political science, he went on to pursue a master’s in international relations and diplomacy on a Chevening scholarship.

With over a decade’s experience in public policy implementation, Blesson has worked extensively with the Government of India, particularly within the Ministry of Rural Development, driving large-scale development initiatives. He has contributed to India’s foreign policy engagements through his work with the Ministry of External Affairs, including in key divisions such as the G20 Secretariat. During India’s G20 presidency, he played a role in supporting negotiations around the New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration and was closely associated with the Trade and Investment Working Group and Startup20 engagement track.

Beyond government, Blesson has designed and led global fellowship programmes aligned with India’s Neighbourhood First policy. He has helped establish self-learning ecosystems across Rwanda and other parts of Africa, creating accessible, open spaces for youth-led innovation and skill development.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Blesson is now focused on integrating education policy with diplomacy to drive systemic change in India’s higher education landscape. His long-term vision is to build world-class academic institutions that advance the vision of Viksit Bharat and democratize access to transformative education.

Priti Gupta

Dr. Priti Gupta is a neuroscientist and Director of Research at Project Prakash, an Indo-US initiative that aims at alleviating curable childhood blindness in India while also demystifying how the human brain learns to see. She got her PhD in Computational Neuroscience from Dayalbagh University and received her post-doctoral training in Cognitive Neuroscience at IIT Delhi. Dr Gupta’s research interests include visual and cognitive development and learning and brain plasticity. As a scientist at Project Prakash, Dr Gupta has worked extensively with children treated for congenital cataracts to understand how vision develops after prolonged visual deprivation. Her work in visual development has featured in several top-tier journals including Science.

To tackle the broad goal of understanding visual development, one needs to adopt a multifaceted approach that merges work with both typically and atypically developing children, and computational modeling. To complement her expertise of working with atypically developing children, as a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence scholar Dr Gupta is acquiring experimental and analytical skills at the Nelson Lab at Harvard University to study typically developing children. Through well-designed studies with babies and toddlers her goal is to characterize the development of temporal vision, thereby furthering the understanding of the critical role time plays in perceptual organization.

Shreyashi Ray

Ms. Shreyashi Ray is a lawyer and policy professional with experience in health, disability, and queer rights. As part of her work at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, Delhi between 2021 and 2025, she has advised union and state governments on legal frameworks for public health emergencies, disability inclusion, and the right to health in India. She has also worked with CSOs and the medical community to recommend policies prioritizing ethical end-of-life care and queer-affirmative healthcare.

Prior to this, she worked with the District Administration of Ranchi from 2018 to 2020 to implement critical health initiatives in under-served areas. During the COVID-19 epidemic, she devised the district’s health and welfare plan with the district machinery and civil society, and established helplines for mental health, domestic violence, and migrant support.

Shreyashi graduated from The WB National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata with a BA, LLB (Hons.) degree in 2016, after which she worked at the National Law University, Delhi till 2018 on the first comprehensive open science report in India.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Shreyashi is studying public health with a focus on health policy and aims to implement rights-based health policies in India that build a culture incentivizing inclusion and sharing of relevant, authentic data. Through this, she hopes to make the public health system in India more transparent, collaborative, inclusive of marginalized communities, and responsive to social needs.

Subhamita Sengupta

Dr. Subhamita Sengupta is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Condensed Matter Physics and Material Sciences at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. She completed her BSc in 2013 from Asutosh College, Kolkata affiliated with the University of Calcutta) and earned her MSc in 2016 from Jadavpur University. She was awarded her PhD in June 2022 from the S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Kolkata. Additionally, she served as a visiting fellow at the same institution from August 2021 to July 2022.

Dr. Sengupta’s research focuses on low-temperature electrical and magnetotransport, vortex dynamics in superconductors, and interface phenomena in complex oxides. She has published in reputed international journalsand received the INSPIRE scholarship during her undergraduate studies.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University, Dr. Sengupta is leveraging advanced techniques developed by Prof. Jennifer Hoffman’s team, combining scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and magnetic force microscopy (MFM), to study superconducting vortices hosting Majorana zero modes — a cornerstone of topological quantum computing. Her research focuses on detecting magnetic field gradients between proximate vortex cores using MFM to determine the parity states of overlapping Majoranas, a critical step toward achieving stable qubit operations and topologically protected quantum logic.

Arjun Bindu Sunil

Dr. Arjun Bindu Sunil is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Sahas Labs, a product development company developing deep-tech robotics and instrumentation solutions based in Kolhapur district, Maharashtra. He also leads Embedite, another startup working on healthcare and sustainability, as the Chief Executive Officer. He completed his BTech in mechanical engineering at Government Engineering College Barton Hill in Trivandrum. He gained his master’s in research and PhD from the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in June 2024 with the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship. His research was focused on developing an intraoperative probe that integrates multimodal tissue characterization and soft robotics to enhance brain tumor margin delineation.

Dr. Sunil has made several significant contributions to neural engineering and biomedical engineering with skillsets in microfabrication, robotics and product design. He has 12 publications in peer-reviewed journals and conferences, four granted patents and eight patent applications. He received the BIRAC SITARE-GYTI Award 2021 and Sun Pharma Science Foundation Science Scholar Award 2022, among others, and is the national winner of James Dyson Award 2022. He represented India at the BRICS Young Scientist Forum 2024 as a young innovator.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellow under the guidance of Prof. Shriya Srinivasan, Dr. Sunil is aiming to develop a myoelectric prosthesis that can be implanted in the upper limbs through modular surgical techniques. The technology used in the proposed prosthesis seeks to improve upper limb control in patients, providing a more accessible and less invasive alternative to existing solutions.

Sushrita Acharjee

Ms. Sushrita Acharjee works as an Assistant Professor of English at the School of Liberal Arts and Culture Studies, Adamas University, Kolkata. She is a PhD candidate at the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, from where she previously earned her MPhil degree. From 2020 to 2022, she was a UGC-JRF and a teaching assistant at the Department of English, Jadavpur University.

In 2024, Sushrita was awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Grant to conduct research in the UK for her doctoral thesis. She contributed to the BBC 3 radio documentary, Recording on the Nomad’s Trail, on Bengali ethnomusicologist Deben Bhattacharya. In 2021, she collaborated with History for Peace under Seagull Foundation for the Arts, Kolkata, India in preparing resources for and moderating a workshop, ‘Aesthetics of Resistance: Revisiting 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War through Various Art Forms’. She also served as a research fellow for Sahapedia-UNESCO on a project, Rituparno Ghosh: The First Queer Star of Bengal.

Sushrita has presented her research at various universities in the UK, Italy, and at Bangla Academy, Bangladesh, among others. She has contributed to publications by Bloomsbury and Routledge. Her research interests traverse sound cultures, war narratives, migration, oral cultures and other literary and performance studies.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Sushrita is investigating the possibility of songs and sounds leading to lesser-known histories of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. She is also training in ethnomusicology under experts, while exploring field research opportunities in the Bangladeshi immigrant communities in the USA.

Arup Biswas

Mr. Arup Biswas is a PhD candidate in Theoretical Physics at The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, Tamil Nadu. His broad research interest lies in the study of non-equilibrium statistical physics and stochastic processes. Here, his primary focus is to quantify and understand a class of complex physical processes such as animal navigation, random search processes, and transport properties and find a universal picture to describe them through a single thread.

Arup holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in physics from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal. There he was a recipient of the INSPIRE scholarship. Thereafter, he qualified in several national-level examinations such as NET JRF, GATE and JEST to avail a fellowship in PhD.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at Harvard University, Arup is working on experimental studies of dung beetles through programmable robots. Dung beetles are fascinating creatures that can use references as far off as the Milky Way galaxy to navigate towards home. His research in the US consists of understanding their motion through theoretical modelling, tabletop experiments and leveraging them for further real-life applications. Apart from academics Arup loves sketching, using cool digital tools and is interested in world politics, stock markets and cricket.