Host Institution USA: Indian Institute of Technology - Delhi

Shruti Sagar

Shruti Sagar received her BA in community health from Tufts University. During her time at Tufts, she evaluated a water infrastructure intervention in Haiti, taught health education to high school students through Peer Health Exchange, and facilitated qualitative fieldwork for local health departments and nonprofits about emerging public health issues.

After graduation, she worked full time at the Medical Practice Evaluation Center in Boston, MA, where she contributed to several NIH-funded cohort studies and randomized controlled trials, including one study exploring the association between air pollution and lung function among people living with HIV in Uganda, and another study on the delivery of PrEP and contraceptives to women in hair salons in South Africa. She is a co-author on multiple peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Annals of the American Thoracic Society, BMC Public Health, and Annals of Internal Medicine.

After her time at the Medical Practice Evaluation Center, Shruti attended the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to complete her MPH. In addition to her research, Shruti served as a teaching assistant for MPH courses on epidemiology, implementation science, and program evaluation.

Shruti’s Fulbright-Nehru research is examining intracity disparities in air pollution exposure in Delhi. She is conducting a spatial analysis to identify and visualize geographic disparities in air pollution exposure and sociodemographic vulnerability, and is supplementing her findings with qualitative fieldwork to explore community perceptions of air pollution risk. In order to inform resource allocation and policy development, Shruti’s project is identifying the geographic areas in Delhi that are the most vulnerable to the impacts of air pollution exposure.

Avi Patel

Avi Patel is a recent graduate of Yale University, where he studied the history of science, medicine, and public health; he also had a concentration in global health studies. His research explores how cities, infrastructure, and environmental conditions shape human health; it focuses particularly on mobility, climate, and health equity, such as the case of rapidly growing Global South cities, where climate change, pollution, and unequal access to infrastructure increasingly affect everyday well-being. Across his research and fieldwork, Avi is interested in how urban design and public policy can help build healthier and more inclusive communities. His academic and professional experiences span environmental health research, global health systems, and science communication. Through international collaboration and research, Avi hopes to contribute to more people-centered approaches to urban development and health.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellow, Avi is studying how air pollution affects physical activity and active mobility in the Delhi National Capital Region. Hosted by IIT Delhi Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Centre under the mentorship of Dr. Rahul Goel, his project is combining geospatial pollution data with time-use and mobility datasets to examine how environmental exposure shapes walking, cycling, and outdoor activity across local neighborhoods and seasons. The project seeks to advance understanding of how environmental conditions influence urban accessibility, public health, and equitable mobility in rapidly urbanizing cities. Ultimately, it aims to facilitate the building of healthier, more equitable, and resilient cities.

Pranathi Dandu

Pranathi Dandu received both her BSPH in biostatistics and her BS in neuroscience, with a minor in chemistry, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She graduated with distinction and honors as both a Carolina Research Scholar and as a Buckley Public Service Scholar, and recently completed her MS in physiology from North Carolina State University. Her academic and research interests focus on the neural mechanisms underlying sensory processing and predictive coding, and their implications for neurological and developmental disorders, particularly autism spectrum disorder. Given her background in public health and experiences in rural India, Pranathi is interested in understanding how gaps in healthcare access and literacy can create barriers to receiving effective medical care. She is especially interested in the role cross-cultural and global health perspectives can play in shaping more accessible and equitable care.

At UNC Chapel Hill, Pranathi worked as a research assistant in Dr. Hiroyuki Kato’s lab in the Department of Psychiatry, investigating the neural circuits underlying predictive coding in the auditory cortex. Her work involved neural tracing and imaging to study how the brain filters and adapts to sensory information. During her time there, she completed an honors thesis examining topographic projections from the orbitofrontal cortex to the auditory cortex; she also coauthored publications. Outside of research, she served as a copresident for the Biostatistics Student Association and was involved with the American Mock World Health Organization as a DAIS codirector. Pranathi also cofounded SPROUT Nutrition, a community initiative focused on providing nutrition education and support for underserved families, for which she received the Robert E. Bryan Fellowship. She hopes to pursue a career as a physician dedicated to translating neuroscience research into accessible, culturally informed interventions for children with neurodevelopmental conditions.

For children with autism spectrum disorder, ordinary sounds like traffic can be overwhelming and disrupt daily life, yet effective interventions remain underdeveloped. Motivated by this gap, Pranathi’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating whether structured auditory training can improve sensory adaptation in autistic children, reducing sensory distress. Working with the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, she is developing and piloting a low-cost, tablet-based intervention and collecting neurophysiological data to assess its efficacy in reducing sensory hypersensitivity and improving adaptive functioning. The findings aim to inform scalable interventions for autism in low-resource settings while advancing our understanding of sensory processing in neurodevelopmental disorders.