Dr. Jennifer Auchter is the inaugural director of the New Mexico Reforestation Center (NMRC), a multi-institutional partnership that builds the state’s capacity to grow and plant seedlings at the scale needed to restore forests after severe wildfire. She approaches reforestation as water and climate infrastructure, linking forest recovery to watershed function, water supply, and landscape resilience. She holds a PhD in environmental engineering and earth sciences from Vanderbilt University. Her academic research examined Quaternary fluvial geomorphology in the eastern Himalaya and how those rivers have fed the deepwater Bengal Fan sedimentary system through time. Dr. Auchter’s career has spanned energy industry research and natural resources management and operations. Before joining NMRC, she founded the Mississippi Embayment Research Center at the University of Memphis, which established a geologic core repository to support regional groundwater research. She has also served on the Science Evaluation Panel of the International Ocean Discovery Program. Across these roles, she has translated complex science into institutional strategy, partnerships, and policy. As a Fulbright Specialist (2024–2027) at IIT Gandhinagar, she is leading training in shallow marine and deepwater sedimentary systems, delivering public talk on reforestation science and governance, and taking part in school outreach.
Host Institution USA: Indian Institute of Technology
Ravi Sundaram
Dr. Ravi Sundaram is a professor of computer science at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and a BTech from IIT Madras. Before joining the faculty at Northeastern in 2003, Dr. Sundaram served as the director of engineering at Akamai Technologies. During this tenure, he established the mapping group responsible for directing browser requests to optimal servers, thereby playing a key role in building one of the world’s largest distributed content delivery networks. His primary research interests lie in networks and algorithms, with a focus on design, performance, and security, as well as combinatorics and complexity theory. Recently, his research has expanded to span cloud security, load balancing, delay-tolerant data transfers, and the development of robust recommendation systems and GPU cluster engines for deep neural network video analysis. He has over 20 patents and 85 published papers in premier CS venues.
Leonardo Flores
Professor Leonardo Flores is the chair of the Department of English at Appalachian State University and the president of the Latin American Electronic Literature Network – Lit(e)Lat. His research areas are electronic literature, with a focus on e-poetry, digital writing, and the history and strategic growth of the field. He is known for “I ♥ E-Poetry”, the “Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3”, “Third Generation Electronic Literature”, and the “Antología Lit(e)Lat, Volume 1”. He was a member of the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on AI and Writing and is now part of the MLA Task Force on Generative AI Initiatives. He is available to offer talks and workshops on AI and its impact on education, policy, scholarship, and creativity. Professor Flores is also a cyborg digital writer with a thriving creative coding practice. For more information on his current work, visit leonardoflores.net.
Eshan Gupta
Eshan Gupta is a recent graduate from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. He graduated with a BS in science, technology, and international affairs with an emphasis on energy and environmental issues. During his time at Georgetown University, he worked on clean-energy procurement for a private-sector consulting company and was also involved in various climate-related government initiatives in the legislative and executive branches. Eshan has extensive experience in international development, both on the funding and implementation sides. He is excited to begin the next chapter of his professional and academic journey with this Fulbright grant to India which he sees as a culmination of his academic and professional experiences thus far, allowing him to explore his research interests, while also expanding his knowledge about the fast-growing clean-energy field.
In his free time, Eshan enjoys singing, Bollywood dancing, and biking.
Eshan’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is working towards understanding why the current deployment of solar microgrids in rural India has not yielded the clean-energy and economic impacts that were promised. In order to study the several educational, social, and technological barriers to solar microgrid usage, Eshan is conducting interviews and policy analysis with various communities to understand how the government can better support rural deployment of solar microgrid to maximize usage; he is also examining the positive developmental and technological outcomes associated with solar power.
Srinivas Reddy
Mr. Srinivas Reddy is a scholar, translator, and musician. He studied classical South Asian languages and literatures at UC Berkeley and currently teaches at Brown University and IIT Gandhinagar. His research in South Asian studies ranges over multiple disciplines, including translation studies, history, cultural studies, and musicology, but his foundation lies in the reading and translation of classical Indian texts. He has published numerous scholarly articles and four books: Giver of the Worn Garland (Penguin, 2010); The Dancer and the King (Penguin, 2014); The Cloud Message (Penguin, 2017); and Raya (Juggernaut, 2020). His forthcoming book, Illuminating Worlds: Anthology of Classical Indian Literature, is set to be released in 2024. Mr. Reddy is also a concert sitarist and spends his time performing, teaching, and conducting research around the world. His performances can be viewed at: http://www.sankalpana.org/
Mr. Reddy’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the ways in which traditional oral repertoires of raga music were transcribed into written manuals for general instruction in late colonial India. Early texts like Maula Bakhsh’s Sangitanubhav (1888), Hazrat Inayat Khan’s Minqar-i-Musiqar (1912), and V.N. Bhatkhande’s Hindusthani Sangeet Padhdhati (1910–32) all enshrined traditional raga music compositions in fixed and printed notational forms. Mr. Reddy is revisiting this rich archive of educational materials with the critical ear of a practicing musician and a modern-day raga music educator.