University of Chicago Archives

Ms. Divya Swaminathan is a Ph.D. scholar at the Infant – Toddler Language Development and Intervention Lab, Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru. Before joining NIMHANS for her Ph.D., Ms. Swaminathan worked at the St. John’s National Academy of Health Sciences, Bengaluru, where she worked on developing an early screening tool for identifying increased likelihood for autism (HL-ASD) in infants between 9-18 months. She is a passionate clinician – researcher with expertise in detection of and intervention for autism.

Ms. Swaminathan’s current area of research focuses on early caregiver speech (CGS) and its impact on the development of communication and language skills in infants at HL-ASD. She is using automatic speech recognition (ASR) models to evaluate early CGS.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Swaminathan has joined Dr. Marisa Casillas’s lab. Ms. Swaminathan is working on improving existing ASR models that are sensitive to a multilingual setup. More accurate ASR models will help automatize amount of CGS that otherwise require laborious hand annotation

Mr. Aditya Vijaykumar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Astrophysical Relativity group at ICTS-TIFR in Bengaluru, working on various aspects of physics, astrophysics, cosmology with gravitational waves. Before joining ICTS-TIFR, he was an undergraduate student at BITS-Pilani, where he received a dual degree in Physics and Mechanical Engineering in 2018.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, Vijaykumar plans to work on understanding gravitational-wave observations from the perspective of cosmological large-scale structure. The advantage of this approach is two-fold: one can confirm existing cosmological inferences from other probes, and independently understand formation environments and mechanisms of the detected gravitational-wave events.

Mr. Vijaykumar is also active in the Bengaluru theatre circuit, as a part of the theatre company StageCraft. Most recently, he was the co-producer of ZOOMED IN!, an online theatre production featuring actors situated across two time zones. He also is an ardent lover of films and runs a film-analysis podcast called Cut to Scene! with a friend.