Host Institution India: University of California

Shubham Pande

Mr. Shubham Pande is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Electrical Engineering department of Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu. His doctoral research primarily focuses on the characterization and modeling of Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM). He is also interested in electro-thermal analysis, compact modeling of electronic devices, and BiCMOS process development. He is an awardee of the prestigious Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship in 2020.

The proposed work under Fulbright-Nehru grant aims to develop strategies for reducing operating current in RRAM devices. This proposal will attempt to address this challenge by optimizing device structure using Multiphysics simulations, compact modeling, and experimental validation. Successful completion of this work will help set design guidelines and develop a fundamental understanding of the technology.

Apart from research, Shubham’s hobbies include reading, traveling, and watching movies.

Sourav Kumar

Mr. Sourav Kumar is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam. His doctoral research focuses on the evaluation of earthquake-induced changes in groundwater composition, commonly known as hydro-geochemical earthquake precursors (associated with the slow accumulation of tectonic stress in the Earth’s crust) in northeast India.

Mr. Kumar obtained his bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering at Uttarakhand Technical University, Dehradun, in 2016. He completed his master’s degree in Earth System Science and Engineering under the Department of Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam, in 2018. He received the MHRD-GATE Fellowship for two years of his M.Tech. in 2016, where he studied the spatio-temporal variability in India’s groundwater storage using GRACE data. As his research expanded and segued into his doctoral research, he has presented his work at international conferences in 2019 and 2021.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, his primary objective is to understand the links between earthquakes and hydrological/hydro-geochemical variation that could be used as basic scientific input required for an impending earthquake prediction at both national and international levels. The proposed study could be used to correlate datasets from northeast India with those from other parts of the world such as Iceland, Japan, Korea, Italy, China, and the United States, that have reported similar earthquake-induced changes in groundwater composition.

In addition to his academic engagements, he also led the cricket team of IIT Guwahati at the ‘All-India Inter-IIT Sports Meet’ during 2017-19 and held several student representative posts at the institutional level throughout his college years.

Utsav Shukla

Utsav Shukla, a civil servant of the Indian Railway Traffic Service (IRTS), works at the intersection of railroad network planning, operations, regional development and urban transport. He has been working for 10 years in northeast India, connecting habitations and nurturing opportunities for improving the living conditions of millions. Hailing from Varanasi, the spiritual center of India, and trained as a medical doctor at Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Medical College, Indore, Utsav has been instrumental in designing people-centric infrastructure, sustainably dovetailing into the eco-sensitive milieu of the region.

Over the last decade, he has headed operations and business verticals, providing policy inputs on freight rebates and cargo aggregation, giving small agro-producers of the region access to national and international markets. He was pivotal in planning, coordinating and executing rail connectivity projects to Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur and Nagaland. For the safe and successful operations of 232 Shramik specials (trains carrying stranded people) while resuscitating the supply chain of life-saving drugs and essential commodities in six northeastern states during the COVID-19 pandemic, he was awarded the National Railway Award 2021, the highest honor for any railway servant by the Minister of Railways, Government of India.

In his latest assignment at the Northeast Frontier Railway’s headquarters in Guwahati, Utsav influenced the operationalization of international connectivity links with Bangladesh and Nepal. Further, his commitment to wildlife conservation and sustainable development has institutionalized effective mitigation mechanisms along the elephant corridors in northeast India, reducing elephant deaths by 60%. Anchoring station redevelopment projects in Guwahati and New Jalpaiguri under the Amrit Bharat scheme, he is currently working on integrating the passenger and freight railway transit nodes with the urban transportation system.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Utsav is studying urban planning to gain insights into policies, technologies and institutions which can make cities more humane, livable and equitable. He intends to explore leadership roles and reforms in governance to bring about citizen engagement in delivering urban services.

Pavithra Venkataraman

Ms. Pavithra Venkataraman is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai. Her research is in the area of evolutionary biology. Specifically, she uses experimental methods to understand the evolution of proteins, and theoretical methods to understand the evolution of metabolic cooperation and sympatric speciation in a population.

Ms. Venkataraman completed her bachelor’s in chemical engineering from M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bengaluru. In 2020, she was awarded the Best Outgoing Chemical Engineering Student by the Bangalore Chapter of the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers. She enjoys exploring new places, cuisines and cultures. She also likes learning new languages.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, she will work with Prof. Sergey Kryazhimskiy to characterize the variation in the local structure of fitness landscapes to assess the predictability of evolution. This work is important to build our understanding of the process of evolution as a whole and has implications for pathogen evolution and human health.

Amal Vijay

Mr. Amal Vijay is pursuing his Ph.D. from the Computational Chemistry and Biophysics group, Department of Chemistry at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune. His current area of research focuses on studying the mechanism of various biomolecular recognition processes, specifically protein-drug and protein-protein interactions and secondary interactions in nucleotides using advanced molecular dynamics simulation techniques.

He completed his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the Loyola College, Chennai, India, and his master’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. He is a recipient of the Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) awarded by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). He is honored by the Rashtrapati Scout award, an award presented by the President of India for his achievement in scouting.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, Vijay is interested in understanding the scope of “RNA breathing” in RNA – protein recognition process using molecular dynamics simulation methods aided by enhanced sampling techniques in computational chemistry. The proposed study project can provide a significant impact on the role of RNA-based drug design for the cure of various diseases.

Vaishali Thakkur

Ms. Vaishali Thakkur is a Ph.D. scholar at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK), Uttar Pradesh. Her research focuses on modelling enzymatic reactions using density functional based on the quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) technique. As a part of her doctoral thesis, she works with the QM/MM method, along with various enhanced sampling techniques, to study the underlying mechanism for antibiotic resistance. She is also interested in identifying and addressing the bottleneck in these calculations to make them more efficient. Apart from science, she enjoys spending her time learning new languages and playing with her color palette.

Prior to joining IITK as a research scholar, she completed her bachelor’s and master’s in Chemistry from Delhi University and Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD), respectively. She has been a recipient of the merit cum means scholarship for her performance at IITD. She also has a year-long experience of working as an online educator and content reviewer at Chegg India Pvt. Ltd.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, she will work with experts to understand and implement a new electrostatic embedding scheme in the existing QM/MM framework. The aim is to develop a model that is accurate and affordable at the same time. The introduction of such a method would be beneficial for people modelling reactions in complex biological systems, where the computation of these electrostatic interactions proves to be time consuming.

Manashita Borah

Dr. Manashita Borah, is as an Assistant Professor (Senior Grade) in the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE), Tezpur University, Assam, India since 2016. She obtained her PhD from Department of EE, NIT Silchar. Dr Borah is the recipient of the Young Scientist Award, conferred by DST, Government of Assam in the State Awards Ceremony for Scientific Excellence in 2019, the Young Engineer’s Award by Senior Engineers Forum, Institution of Engineers in 2018 and two IEEE best paper awards. Additionally, she also received the Distinguished Anundoram Borooah Merit Award from the Government of Assam and Oil India Limited.

Dr Borah leads the Control System Design and Simulation Laboratory in the Department of EE at Tezpur University, where her research group is focusing on designing fractional-order controllers, IoT enabled renewable energy systems, among others.

Her Fulbright-Kalam project aims to address two open problems faced globally: shortcomings of existing energy infrastructure and climate sustainable energy storage by capitalizing on green energy sources. She will be working on designing a smart hybrid storage system to deliver an improved, sustainable, resilient, safe, and efficient green energy storage infrastructure. It will address the serious implications of climate change faced in her home state of Assam, such as heavy floods due to the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, soil erosion and landslides that cause power outage for several days.

Apart from being conferred with prestigious awards and having publications in reputed journals, she has been actively associated with various departmental, academic and co-curricular activities of the university, such as dance, drama, and yoga. She has been trained in the Indian classical dance forms of Bharatnatyam and Shattriya for twelve years.

Venugopal Vuruputur

Dr. Venugopal Vuruputur is presently a faculty member in the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (CAOS), Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. He has an M.S. and Ph.D. from University of Minnesota and a B.Tech. from IIT Madras, all in Civil Engineering (with specialization in Hydrology). Since joining CAOS, Dr. Vuruputur and his students have focused on characterizing the multiscale space-time structure of tropical rainfall and its variability. More recently, he has also been exploring hydrology-oriented problems, including estimation and simulation of surface and subsurface storage and their variability in the Ganges-Brahmaputra River system, coupled with analyzing geochemical markers upstream of the river to better characterize and understand landslide-triggered flash floods. He was an Associate Editor of Water Resources Research during the period 2013-2017 and has been on the review editorial board of Frontiers in Atmospheric Sciences since 2015. He has also been a member of national and regional committees related to cloud seeding experiments in India, and water resources management.

During his stint as a Fulbright-Kalam fellow at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), in collaboration with Prof. Jin-Yi Yu of the Department of Earth Science, Dr. Vuruputur proposes to identify and robustly characterize pathways from the midlatitudes that can potentially modulate the sub seasonal variability of the Indian monsoon, especially in the early and late phases of the season.

Chanchal Yadav

Ms. Chanchal Yadav, an Indian Administrative Service officer, belongs to the 2008 batch of the Arunachal, Goa, Mizoram, and Union Territories (AGMUT) cadre. A postgraduate in political science from the University of Delhi, she is known for her innovations in public service delivery systems. She has diverse experience working in various capacities in the Union Territory of Daman, the border state of Arunachal Pradesh, the capital city of Delhi and the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India.

As Secretary, New Delhi Municipal Council, she brought substantial improvement in civic services delivery, leveraging technology. She successfully steered the organization towards becoming the first municipal body in country to go cashless. Her concerted efforts towards the cleanliness of the city resulted in NDMC becoming the first Open Defecation Free (ODF) urban local body of Delhi; the organization continuously remained amongst the top cities in the Swachh Sarvekshans by the Government of India.

Under her leadership, the district administration of Changlang more than doubled its annual revenue collection, successfully rolled out livelihood missions and registered a steady decline in insurgency-related incidents. She was conferred the Governor’s Gold Medal for her meritorious public service. As Special Secretary to the Lieutenant Governor, Delhi, she effectively coordinated with agencies responsible for the civic administration of the capital and contributed to the drafting of Delhi’s Master Plan Document 2041.

Ms. Yadav is passionate about urban governance and as a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, she aims to gain specialization in the sector and orient her civil services career around it. She loves to be in nature and gardening is her favorite hobby.

Sadhana Naithani

Dr. Sadhana Naithani is a Professor at the Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. She is the Coordinator of the Folklore Unit at JNU, an Honorary Fellow of the American Folklore Society, and the current President of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research.

She did her Ph.D. in the field of German Folkloristics. She has been interested in the transformation of the concept of folklore in different historical contexts-under British colonialism, in Germany after World War II, and in the Baltic countries under Soviet occupation. She is the author of In Quest of Indian Folktales (Indiana University Press, 2006), The Story Time of the British Empire (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), Folklore Theory in Post-war Germany (University Press of Mississippi, 2014) and Folklore in Baltic History, Resistance and Resurgence (University Press of Mississippi, 2019). Her novella: Elephantine (Red Squirrel Press, 2016) is based on her research in colonial forestry led by German scientists in British India. She is on the editorial boards of journals Marvels and Tales, Cultural Analysis, and Journal of the School of Languages.

Dr. Naithani is deeply interested in the relationship of human and non-human beings experienced in cultural-political contexts and expressed in narratives. As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar at University of California, Berkeley, she will explore the narratives of British colonizers about the wild non-human animals of the colonies. She will teach a graduate course in the Fall Semester and an undergraduate course in the Spring Semester around her research theme.