Host Institution India: Harvard University

Radhakrishnan Balasubramanian

Mr. Radhakrishnan Balasubramanian is a postgraduate in microbiology from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi. Driven by his passion towards public service, he joined the Indian Administrative Service in the year 2008. He has served in various capacities in Maharashtra for the past 14 years and is currently the Municipal Commissioner of Nagpur Municipal Corporation.

Mr. Balasubramanian made many interventions to improve learning outcomes in government schools. His quality education initiatives served as a model for the rest of the state. As District Collector, he helped solve many complex land acquisition issues, implement land record digitization, and re-engineered the archaic fruit valuation policy of the state. He was awarded the Best District Collector Award by the Government of Maharashtra for his innovative practices in public service.

As a civic chief of Nagpur, Mr. Balasubramanian successfully implemented GIS mapping of land parcels and properties, which resulted in a substantial increase in the municipal corporation’s revenue. He planned and executed many Public Private Partnership (PPP) projects in the urban sector, such as managing the city’s drinking water supply, public transport, and streetlights.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellowship, Mr. Balasubramanian is pursuing a graduate degree in public administration from Harvard University. He believes this would equip him with analytical skills and approaches to public policy making. On returning to India, Mr. Balasubramanian intends to work on various issues concerning the urban sector at the state and central levels.

Tanita Abraham

Ms. Tanita Abraham is an independent consultant who has been working in the higher education space for around a decade. She works with universities and graduate programs to help shape them, lay a strong foundation for governance, and build them sustainably for the future. She helped set up the office of faculty and research at Ashoka University, among other projects in its first five years of inception.

Ms. Abraham completed the Young India Fellowship in 2014, a program that inspired her to work in higher education and to help other learners get the best out of their classroom experience. She also worked as a journalist with The Hindu at the Hyderabad desk and graduated from the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai. She completed her bachelor’s degree from Christ College, Bengaluru in English, psychology, and journalism.

Through her Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellowship at Harvard University, Ms. Abraham hopes to understand the foundations of higher education better and further the work around access and inclusion in India.

Siva Naga Pavani Ayinampudi

Siva Naga Pavani Ayinampudi is a life scientist with a master’s and Ph.D. in animal biology from the University of Hyderabad. She holds a remarkable academic record, having received the Achievers Award three times and the Kiran Kumar gold medal in 2010. She is currently serving as an Officer on Special Duty (OSD) with the Telangana Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (TSWREIS), Government of Telangana, overseeing 30 residential undergraduate institutions. Prior to this, she was a lecturer and taught zoology at the undergraduate level. In her role as OSD, she championed the efforts to improve the quality of education for around 30,000 young women from under-served communities in Telangana. Her leadership has transformed institutional practices, fostering international collaborations with renowned universities such as Harvard, John Hopkins, and the University of Toledo, along with partnerships with organizations like Launch Girls, United Way, and Nirmaan.

Under Pavani’s guidance, TSWREIS’s Department of Higher Education introduced pioneering programs, including a bachelor’s in pharmacy, agriculture, and unique courses like BSc in design and technology, BSc in bioinformatics, and French as a second language. She co-created the TSWREIS Research Council, promoting research engagement among students and staff, and is the convenor of the institution’s first international conference, BioMe 2023.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Pavani is deepening her understanding of higher education administration, learn best practices, and contribute to enhancing the landscape of higher education in India. She aspires to democratize education, and design customized frameworks for institutions enabling them to serve as catalysts in societal transformation.

Lakshmi Priya Manirangu Sobhana

M.S. Lakshmi Priya, an officer of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), hails from the state of Kerala, and is a medical doctor by training. She is a recipient of the prestigious Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Administration for her project Sampoorna which helped reduce childhood malnutrition by 95.6% in the district of Bongaigaon in Assam where she worked as district collector. The project is based on the concept of ‘positive deviance’ and an innovation called ‘buddy mother’ model which is adopted in the national guidelines for combating malnutrition in the country.

Lakshmi Priya has been working in the state of Assam since 2015 in various capacities such as assistant collector in Jorhat, sub-collector in Bijni and Bilasipara, collector in Sivasagar and Bongaigaon, and as State Mission Director (MD) of National Health Mission (NHM). As MD, NHM, she has been instrumental in the reduction of maternal and child death rates in the state of Assam. She is known to be an upright officer who believes in participative governance and women empowerment. She also has the experience of working in the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. She is an accomplished Carnatic musician who has performed in over a hundred venues, including the Rashtrapathi Bhavan, and Indira Gandhi Centre for the Arts, New Delhi.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Lakshmi Priya is studying public health in the U.S., which will help her broaden her vision, and focus further on policy formulation and the smooth implementation of health-related administrative innovations. She believes her time in the U.S. will enable her to become a part of the larger global community working towards the betterment of humanity.

Ashutosh Kumar

Ashutosh Kumar is an Associate Professor of History at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. He earned his Ph.D. from the History Department of the University of Delhi, where he also taught from 2012 to 2014. He received South-South Exchange Program for Research on the History of Development (SEPHIS), a Government of Netherlands funded program Fellowship during his Ph.D. He was fellow at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom; Yale University, USA; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, and at Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla. He is president of Indian Association for South Asian Studies (IASAS) and Chairman of Centre for Alternative Studies in Social Sciences, New Delhi.

His most recent publications include Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830-1920’, Cambridge University Press, 2017 and ‘Girmitiyas and Global Indian Diaspora: Origins, Memories and Identities’ Cambridge University Press, 2023.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence scholar, Dr. Kumar is exploring issue of rights of Indian indentured laborers on colonial sugar plantations during nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the letters, petitions and depositions of indentured Indian migrants with a particular emphasis on the letters they wrote in regional Indian language. His project analyses such laborers’ letters and makes the case that Indian indentured laborers were able to fight for their “rights”, natural and contractual with planters and the colonial government through petitions, in addition to being able to voice their feelings and concerns on a variety of other matters.

Vasudharani Devanthan

Dr Vasudharani Devanthan is Associate Professor, Department of Biology and Associate Dean of Students at IISER Tirupati. Dr Devanathan’s research group at IISER Tirupati is engaged in understanding the structure and functional changes induced in retinal neurons in altered metabolic conditions such as hyperglycemia and hypoxia. Their research will contribute to understanding signaling mechanisms underlying diabetic retinopathy and the impact of glucose insult to neurons in long term diabetes. Collaborating with clinicians in Tirupati area, she is also engaged in novel biomarkers for Glioblastoma.

Dr Devanathan completed her postgraduate degree from the University of Madras and was working in Astra Zeneca, Bengaluru as a junior scientist. She completed her Ph.D. from Center for Molecular Neurosciences in Hamburg. She did her postdoctoral studies in university hospitals of Duesseldorf and Tübingen. She returned to India and had a short stint at the M.S University of Baroda (Dr Vikram Sarabhai Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology) as a teaching faculty. She has been with IISER Tirupati since its inception from 2015.

Dr Devanathan’s Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence project is focused on understanding the electrophysiological changes in retinal neurons altered glucose and will be engaged in mouse behavioral studies.