Host Institution USA: Indian Institute of Science

James Pascoe

Prof. James Pascoe is an assistant professor of mathematics at Drexel University, working in various areas of mathematics. He graduated from the University of California, San Diego, under the guidance of Prof. Jim Agler in 2015. Prof. Pascoe’s international collaborations span the globe and a variety of mathematical topics, all united by the theme of using functional analysis to explore the semantic meaning of mathematics through a variety of avatars of mathematics. His existing collaborations with junior mathematicians in India include those with Sujit Sakharam Damase, Chandan Pradhan, and Nitin Tomar.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Pascoe is working with researchers at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, with a focus on creating material links between the operator theory research communities in the United States and India. As part of the project, Prof. Pascoe, inspired by the great Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, is visiting various institutes in India and speaking on topics in modern operator theory, while also helping junior mathematicians in establishing their research programs and connections with the global community.

Sreejayan Nair

Dr. Sreejayan Nair, PhD, MPharm, FAHA, is professor of pharmacology, chair of the Division of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and director of the Biomedical Sciences PhD Program at the University of Wyoming, and also serves as the pharmacology thread lead for the WWAMI Medical School, overseeing integrated pharmacology education for medical students. He received his PhD from the College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Manipal, India, and completed his postdoctoral training at the Department of Medicine II, Klinikum Grosshadern, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Germany, and the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, U.S. Dr. Nair has over 30 years of experience in pharmacology education, translational research, and mentorship, with his research focusing on protease biology and translational therapeutics for diabetes complications, cardiovascular disease, and neuroinflammation. He has led projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the American Heart Association (AHA), and the American Diabetes Association (ADA), and has received multiple industry grants, supporting both basic discovery and translational applications. He has also authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications. A co-founder of two pharmaceutical start-ups, Dr. Nair holds patents in protease-targeted therapeutics, and has served as the principal investigator on NIH SBIR/STTR grants for bridging academic research and commercial innovation. He also serves as the mentoring director for the WY-NIH Sensory Biology COBRE, providing structured guidance to junior faculty. His teaching has been consistently recognized with honors such as the Ellbogen Meritorious Classroom Teaching Award and the Entrepreneur Award at the National IDeA Symposium of Biomedical Research Excellence. He has also contributed to the training of PhD, postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students.

Dr. Nair’s Fulbright-Nehru project is integrating teaching and research to enhance pharmacology education and translational drug discovery at BITS Hyderabad. As part of the project, he is teaching a molecular pharmacology course, mentoring graduate students, and collaborating on molecular pharmacology/drug discovery projects related to diabetes complications and neuroinflammation. By combining classroom instruction with hands-on research and mentoring, the project aims to strengthen student training, support BITS’s PhD-IMPACT/DRIVE initiatives, and foster long-term Indo-U.S. collaborations in pharmacology and therapeutic innovation.

Jared Mazzanti

Mr. Jared Mazzanti currently serves as the director of Strategic Initiatives in the Dean’s Office at the University of California (UC), Berkeley School of Public Health, where he has designed and operationalized multiple programs focused on health innovation internationally and domestically. He spearheads a novel partnership with J.P. Morgan that brought a new healthcare conference to Asia, oversees a Health Innovation Accelerator for Taiwanese start-ups, and previously built a Social Impact Innovation Grant Program to provide student teams resources and training to effect positive change in their communities.

A Boren scholarship to China in 2009 ignited Mr. Mazzanti’s lifelong drive to build bridges between peoples and cultures, especially in Asia. He has launched and sustained multi-country partnerships in his previous roles at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, UC Berkeley’s Office of the Chancellor, and the HNA Group in China.

Mr. Mazzanti received his BA in political economy with the distinction of magna cum laude from UC, where he concentrated in East Asia and minored in Chinese. He received his MBA in 2016 after completing a Chinese-taught program at Central South University (中南大学) in China’s Hunan province. He is an active member of UC Berkeley’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Council, regularly volunteers for the Asia Society of Northern California, and maintains professional credentials in HR and project management.

Mr. Mazzanti’s Fulbright project is conducting a comparative analysis on how universities in India (Indian Institute of Science), Japan (Tohoku University), and South Korea (Seoul National University) are bridging the gap between invention and innovation, especially in health-related deep tech; this is to identify success stories and pain points, the latter preventing faster uptake of university research by industry. His research aims to answer one key question through surveys and stakeholder interviews: what factors best position a university to integrate into local and national innovation ecosystems and drive entrepreneurship among its faculty, students, staff, and alumni?

Sankarasubramanian Arumugam

Prof. Sankarasubramanian Arumugam is a faculty at North Carolina State University. His primary research interest lies in understanding, modeling, and forecasting large-scale hydroclimate information and utilizing that information for improved food, water, energy nexus. In this context, he has developed both physical and stochastic models in hydroclimatology, as well as stochastic optimization models for incorporating climate information into water, energy and crop-water management models. He received his PhD in water resources engineering from Tufts University in 2001. After that, he worked as a postdoctoral research scientist and as associate research scientist at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society. He has also worked as a consultant for the World Bank focusing on the role of environmental impact assessment in improving development projects.

Dr. Arumugam has published more than 120 refereed articles in various top-tier journals such as Water Resources Research, Earth’s Future, and Journal of Geophysical Research. He has mentored 9 postdoctoral scientists, 21 PhD students, and 5 MS students. He has served as the lead principal investigator for various interdisciplinary flagship initiatives of the National Science Foundation (NSF) on climate and sustainability. He has received the prestigious CAREER award from NSF. Dr. Arumugam has also led an AGU Chapman International Conference on seasonal hydroclimatic predictions and water management.

He is currently serving as an associate editor with Geophysical Research Letters and has served on the editorial board of publications like Water Resources Research and Journal of Hydrology. Apart from serving on several NSF panels, he was a panelist for the NAS workshop on utilizing water-use information. He has also led several workshops for the USGS Powell Center and the World Meteorological Organization.

Dr. Arumugam’s Fulbright-Kalam project is pursuing four key research activities: developing a national assessment of Food, Water and Energy Systems (FEWS) security; synthesizing opportunities and challenges to improve FEWS resilience under near-term climate change; capacity building of agencies on state-of-the-art models in FEWS research through workshops; and training next-gen scientists through short-term courses on utilizing hydroclimatic information for improving FEWS resilience.

John Lesieutre

Prof. John Lesieutre is an associate professor of mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, working in the field of algebraic geometry. He completed his education from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after which he held a postdoctoral position at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focus is on the geometry of higher-dimensional algebraic varieties, which are sets of solutions to systems of polynomial equations in many variables. He is particularly interested in how symmetries of the solution sets of these systems can shed light on the geometry of the underlying systems of equations. He has published numerous articles in this field.

Prof. Lesieutre’s Fulbright-Nehru project has three major components: to initiate a new research collaboration on the algebraic aspects of K-stability with a researcher at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc); to teach an informal mini course for IISc graduate students on algebraic dynamics; and to continue his studies on algebraic dynamics.

Jayaraman Sivaguru

Dr. Jayaraman Sivaguru is a distinguished university professor at Bowling Green State University (BGSU), Ohio. His recognitions include the 2008 NSF CAREER award, the 2010 Grammaticakis-Neumann Prize from the Swiss Chemical Society, and the young investigator awards from the Inter-American Photochemical Society (2011) and Sigma-Xi (2012). Besides, he won the 2012 Peltier Award for Innovation in Teaching from NDSU. He was a visiting young professor at the Global Centre for Excellence, Osaka University, and was also visiting fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences under the President’s International Fellowship Initiative. He serves as the American editor for the Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology A: Chemistry and as the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology. In 2021, he was awarded the Honda-Fujishima Lectureship by the Japanese Photochemistry Association for outstanding achievement in photochemistry. In 2023, he received the Olscamp Award from BGSU. In 2025, he was named as the 48th Probst Lecturer at SIUE. Dr. Sivaguru is a member of the International Organizing Committee for the IAPS-2026 meeting in Sao Paulo and will also co-chair the 2027 Gordon Conference on Photochemistry.

His research interests include: uncovering new excited state chemical reactivity; light-induced axial to central chiral transfer; asymmetric organo-photocatalysis; supramolecular photocatalysis with water-soluble nanocontainers; light-responsive materials for polymer circularity; development of high-efficiency photoinitiators; and designing light-initiated strategies for eye protection and ophthalmic applications (e.g. contact lenses and other eyewear).

Dr. Sivaguru is passionate about helping students to gravitate toward STEM disciplines. Toward this, in 2007, he launched an outreach program called PICNICS (Parents Involvement with Children Nurturing Intellectual Curiosity in Sciences).

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Sivaguru is collaborating with Prof. N. Jayaraman of the Indian Institute of Science on photochemical aspects within dendritic systems. He is also collaborating with Prof. Ashok Mishra at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras on photophysical studies. Besides, Prof. Sivaguru is holding classes on photochemistry. He is also evaluating the feasibility of adapting PICNICS to an Indian setting.

Sandip Mazumder

Dr. Sandip Mazumder is professor and associate chair of mechanical and aerospace engineering at The Ohio State University (OSU). He joined OSU in March 2004. Prior to OSU, he was employed at the CFD Research Corporation in Huntsville, AL, for seven years. He is one of the architects and early developers of the commercial code, CFD-ACE+™. His research is computational in nature and spans three main areas: computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer emphasizing on chemical reactions, with applications in combustion, catalytic conversion, fuel cells, batteries, and chemical vapor deposition; thermal radiation and its applications; and non-equilibrium transport phenomena as occurring in nanoscale systems. He has been active in raising awareness about global warming and climate change among engineering students and the general public through his classroom teaching and seminars. Dr. Mazumder is the author of two graduate-level textbooks, more than 65 journal papers, and over 65 peer-reviewed conference publications. He is the recipient of the McCarthy Engineering Teaching Award and the Lumley Research Award from the OSU College of Engineering. He has also been a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers since 2011.

In light of the fact that the U.S. and India are ranked second and third, respectively, among the highest carbon dioxide-producing nations, Dr. Mazumder’s Fulbright-Kalam project involves a collaborative one-semester part-teaching, part-research stint at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru. For this, he is creating and deploying two modules with the objective of increasing awareness about global warming and its causes among the future engineering workforce in both the countries. While the teaching module has a short ambit, the research module, titled “Hierarchical Models for Atmospheric Solar Radiation Transport and Earth’s Temperature Predictions”, is attempting to answer long-standing questions on the impact of greenhouse gases on global warming.

Caroline Troy

Caroline Troy is a recent graduate of Brown University where she earned her BSc in environmental science, with a focus on conservation science and policy. For her senior honors thesis, she researched environmental predictors of biogeographical variations in woodpecker drumming. She has interned with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s ForestGEO program, Brooklyn College’s Urban Ecology and Environment NSF REU, Morgan State University’s Patuxent Environmental & Aquatic Research Laboratory, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Brown University Herbarium.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Caroline is researching the effect of urbanization on bat diversity in South India. In this context, she is carrying out passive acoustic monitoring across undeveloped to highly urbanized bat habitat sites in and around Bengaluru. India is home to around 130 bat species. However, these remarkable mammals are threatened by habitat loss due to urbanization, logging, and agriculture. It is estimated that a quarter of the bat species in India are vulnerable or endangered. In order to create effective conservation strategies, Caroline is examining which bat species can coexist with humans in developed regions and which may be threatened without habitat preservation.

Anish Bagga

As a graduate from Emory University with aspirations of entering the medical field and a passion for mathematics and computer science, Anish Bagga seeks to connect the medical world with math and machine learning. By bridging these fields, he hopes to bring a unique approach to patient care and medical research. At Emory, he was involved with the Emory International Relations Association as the head delegate of the Model UN team and also helped found Oxford’s Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Activist organization. Anish’s current research involves modeling influenza reassortment, building a computational model of the human thyroid hormone, and using machine learning to reconstruct electrocardiography profiles. His research in influenza resulted in a publication which stated that avian hosts do not stringently select against less-fit influenza A virus (IAV) strains, thus facilitating the reassortment of diverse IAVs which increases the likelihood of zoonosis. His second publication regarding influenza A reassortment ascertained that the respiratory structure within a host like swine could support increased diversity through reassortment; this he did through the construction of reassortment simulations in non-compartmentalized respiratory systems and compared its results to the data from the extensively compartmentalized swine lungs. Based on the results, it was determined that compartmentalization does not increase viral diversity; instead, it provides pockets where viruses that are less fit for swine but more fit for humans can thrive. The research helped elucidate the importance of swine in the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic.

Vaccines elicit a stronger immune response through the injection of a weakened virus which facilitates the formation of germinal centers containing a viral fragment: i.e., an antigen. In affinity maturation, B cells with B cell receptors (BCRs) that strongly bind to the antigen are selected for. These B cells secrete antibodies identical to their BCRs which bind to the viral components during infection, thus marking the virus for destruction. The more selective this process, the greater the antibody binding affinity, and thus a greater future immune response. To optimize the influenza A vaccine, a stochastic simulation of affinity maturation is also being developed during the study.

Karen Daniels

Prof. Karen Daniels is a distinguished professor of physics at North Carolina State University. She received her BA in physics from Dartmouth College in 1994, taught middle and high school for several years, and then pursued a PhD in physics from Cornell University. After receiving her doctorate in 2002, she moved to North Carolina to do research at Duke University and then joined the faculty at NC State in 2005. In 2011–2012, she received an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship which allowed her to spend the year conducting research at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany. She has served as chair of the American Physical Society Division on Soft Matter, and as divisional associate editor for Physical Review Letters, and currently serves on the editorial board of the Annual Reviews of Condensed Matter Physics. She is also a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Her main research interests center around experiments on the non-equilibrium and nonlinear dynamics of granular materials, fluids, and gels. These experiments have allowed her lab to address questions of how failure occurs, how non-trivial patterns arise, and what controls the transitions between different types of flows or material properties. When not working with her students on experiments in the lab, Prof. Daniels likes to spend time in the outdoors, which leads her to contemplate on the implications of her research for geological and ecological systems. In her work, she has often idealized systems to provide insights into industrial and natural processes of interest to engineers and earth scientists.

In her Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, Prof. Daniels is collaborating with scientists and engineers – both at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and beyond – on the mechanics of granular materials, a class of materials such as soils, agricultural grains, and pharmaceutical powders which exhibit both solid-like and liquid-like behaviors. Her aims are to investigate the regime near the transition in those behaviors; develop new experiments which quantify the mechanisms through which the inclusion of rigid fibers modifies the material’s strength; and make flow predictions through both statistical and continuum models. In teaching IISc students, she is developing open-source teaching materials with a focus on experimental methods.