Host Institution USA: Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay

Sumukhi Prasad

Sumukhi Prasad received her BS in environmental engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. There, she conducted research on the intake by minority communities of the primary and secondary particulate matter emitted by the landfills in Los Angeles, California. After winning the Environmental Engineers of the Future (E2F) scholarship, she was funded by a consortium of companies to pursue an MS in environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. During her MS, in continuation of her undergraduate research in environmental justice, Sumukhi had the opportunity to draft a public comment for the Union of Concerned Scientists regarding the tightening of National Ambient Air Quality Standards.

While completing her MS coursework, she interned for an environmental engineering firm, CDM Smith, where she supported USAID’s efforts in water and infrastructure rehabilitation in Lebanon. She continued with this project after her MS and worked full time at CDM Smith for a year. Eager to conduct research to address air pollution disparities in the United States, she started her PhD in environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Sumukhi’s research at UC Berkeley aims to quantify the spatial and temporal variability in air pollution personal exposure, specifically from the refineries in Martinez, California. She is collaborating with a grassroots advocacy group called Healthy Martinez to hold refineries accountable for air pollution violations in the Martinez community. While her research interests lie at the intersection of air quality, public health, policy, and air pollution exposure monitoring, Sumukhi also has extensive experience in working alongside communities and conducting community-based participatory research.

Sumukhi’s Fulbright-Nehru project is using a novel spatiotemporal personal exposure framework to analyze the emission sources that drive space–time variability in PM2.5 exposures among adults in Mumbai, India. With a collection of GPS locations and measurements, the study is attributing personal exposures to their respective locations using a technique involving density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise. Using the knowledge of Mumbai’s source locations, the aim is to identify the sources that are more fractionally contributing to PM2.5 personal exposures.

Pran Teelucksingh

Pran Teelucksingh recently received his BS in Chemistry and a BA in health and human biology from Brown University, Rhode Island. His research interests include bacterial metabolites and natural products. At Brown, Pran conducted research in the Kizer Lab, where he worked on optimizing the recombinant expression of glycan antigens in E. coli. He also served as a head tutor and teaching assistant for the organic chemistry sequence. He is especially interested in the intersection between public health and science. During his earlier years of college, he spent time in several student-led public health organizations and also co-published a research article on campus accessibility.

Outside of work, Pran enjoys hiking, baking, gardening, reading visual novels, and playing the trumpet and RPG video games.

Pran’s Fulbright-Nehru project is seeking to uncover novel antibiotic scaffolds and producers that can serve as the foundation for novel antimicrobial therapies. The research involves screening natural product extracts for bioactivity against Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria, identifying a bioactive extract, purifying the metabolite, and then characterizing the metabolite’s activity toward drug-resistant bacteria. The study is also mapping the biosynthetic gene cluster of such a metabolite by using the bioinformatic tool antiSMASH.

Shrutika Gupta

Shrutika Gupta is a recent graduate of Rice University, where she earned a BSc in biosciences cum laude and completed minor studies in global health technologies and medical humanities. While at Rice, Gupta was awarded the Wagoner Fellowship to conduct research in global surgery at the University of Oxford. Her work examined disparities in clinical outcomes after pediatric surgery across different countries. Shrutika also spent time in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, with NEST360, an international alliance working to end preventable newborn deaths. There, she investigated the impact of hospital infrastructure on sick newborn care. She was also an undergraduate researcher in genome editing and neuroscience labs at the Bioscience Research Collaborative.

Shrutika is particularly passionate about developing accessible healthcare solutions. Through a Rice incubator program, she is developing a health intervention to improve access to maternal care in the rural areas of Texas. She has also collaborated on multiple medical device projects, including NeoTube, a neonatal feeding tube solution; ReVulva, a vulvar cancer training model (with Rice360 and the MD Anderson Cancer Center); and Brain Power, a low-cost intuitive EEG device (with Rice360, Georgetown MedStar, and the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Malawi). She was a finalist at the Johns Hopkins Healthcare Design Competition as part of Team NeoTube, and she has also presented her work on Brain Power at the Houston Global Health Conference.

Shrutika’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is investigating the impact of cultural practices on women’s engagement with healthcare systems during the postpartum period. As part of her study, she is interacting with patients, healthcare workers, and family members of patients to gather well-rounded and diverse perspectives. The goal is to identify trends that can help guide the development of interventions to minimize health inequities in India.

Emily Kumpel

Dr. Emily Kumpel is an associate professor in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research advances sustainable and equitable drinking water systems through innovative approaches to water quality, household storage, and data science applications. With over 40 peer-reviewed publications on topics such as intermittent water supply, disinfection byproducts, water quality monitoring, and small water systems, she has secured more than $15 million in funding from NSF, EPA, Massachusetts agencies, and private foundations. Her current projects include an NSF CAREER award investigating household water storage as a reliability strategy, and extensive partnership work with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP). She leads comprehensive drinking water assistance programs for the state of Massachusetts, including support for complying with the Safe Drinking Water Act, research on emerging contaminants among small and disadvantaged communities, lead testing in schools and childcare facilities, and small systems technical assistance. She has received multiple awards such as the College of Engineering Barbara H. and Joseph J. Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Award (2024), Outstanding Teaching Award (2022), and a PIT@UMass Faculty Fellowship (2024). Dr. Kumpel serves as associate editor for AWWA Water Science and has extensive international field research experience, having lived and conducted research for over six years across India and countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

Before joining UMass in 2017, she was a senior research scientist at Aquaya Institute in Kenya, where she led water-quality monitoring and evaluation projects across multiple countries. She earned her PhD and MS in civil and environmental engineering from UC Berkeley and a BS in mechanical engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Kumpel’s Fulbright-Nehru project is developing metrics for water supply continuity and predictability, testing new measurement methods, and analyzing the sources of unpredictability. He is conducting his fieldwork in and around Mumbai with the faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. The intended outcomes of the research are at least two co-authored manuscripts, mutual student mentorship, and establishment of networks to enable future research endeavors.

Abiola Makinde

Ms. Abiola Makinde is a Nigerian-American woman from Lagos and South Florida. As a recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Industrial Design, she completed a senior thesis centered around Sickle Cell and Pain Management. As an Emergency Design Council Fellow she collaborated with designers from the IDC School of Design and the National Institute of Design in researching and designing solutions to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the mental health of children in India. Ms. Makinde has also served as a Design Educator for high school students in an after-school program, which focused on the fundamentals and importance of collaborating in the design thinking process.

Ms. Makinde’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining research design solutions to extend culturally relevant and adaptable hospital and home tools and services for Indian children with Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) and their caretakers past the hospital and into their homes before and after visits. With the support of Prof. Ravi Poovaiah of The Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and Dr. Yazdi Italia of the Shirin and Jamshed Guzder Regional Blood Centre, her intention is to understand the patient’s journey and challenge points to find ways, through the lens of design, to positively affect the overall experience of the patient and the caregiver.

Harshini Venkatachalam

Harshini Venkatachalam has a BA in computer science and visual art from Brown University. For six semesters, she was a teaching assistant in the computer science department at Brown and received a Senior Prize for contributions to the department. Harshini is broadly interested in using computing and technology for social good.

Harshini’s Fulbright-Nehru project is developing technology to help learners develop computational thinking skills. Computational thinking encompasses a range of skills in problem solving and system design, with one key skill being abstraction – the ability to overcome complexity by generalizing solutions. Harshini’s project is motivated by the need to understand how novice programmers learn abstraction within the existing pedagogy and thus develop novel methods to help them learn abstraction. During her study, in the course of development of tools, data is also being collected about participant engagement. The deliverables of the project include a novel tool (a mobile application), a literature review, and a detailed report.