Host Institution USA: Indian Institute of Technology Madras

Ravindra Duddu

Originally from India, Dr. Ravindra Duddu got his BTech in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Subsequently, he obtained his MS and PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Northwestern University. After that he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics and Columbia University in the City of New York. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Vanderbilt University, with secondary appointments in Mechanical Engineering and Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Dr. Duddu’s research interests and work experience are in the area of computational solid mechanics with an emphasis on fracture mechanics and multi-physics modeling of material damage evolution. His research is interdisciplinary and spans the disciplines of engineering mechanics, earth and environmental sciences, applied mathematics, and scientific computing. Specific application interests include: fracture of glaciers ice and ice shelves, delamination of fiber reinforced composites, and corrosion/fracture of metal alloys. He is an author on 35 peer-reviewed journal articles with more than 1000 citations, and has a h-index of 16. He has generated more than $1.5 million in grants from federal agencies and industry, and has mentored several post doctorate, graduate and undergraduate students in his research group.

Dr. Duddu is a recipient of the US National Science Foundation CAREER award and the Royal Society International Exchanges travel award. He also received the Junior Faculty Teaching Fellowship at Vanderbilt University and the US Office of Naval Research Summer Faculty Fellowship. He is a member of ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute, American Geophysical Union, and United States Association for Computational Mechanics.

The goal of Dr. Duddu’s Fulbright-Kalam project is to expand and strengthen collaborations between his research group at Vanderbilt University and the faculty and students of the Center of Excellence (CoE) on Subsurface Mechanics at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM). The project’s research aim is to develop state-of-the-art computationally efficient schemes for solving fracture mechanics problems encountered in Earth, Environmental and Energy Sciences, through a combination of teaching (seminars and short-courses) and research activities (involving PhD students) at the CoE. These schemes will be tailored to study the plausible mechanisms triggering ice-rock avalanches and identify the vulnerabilities of Himalayan glaciers.

Karun Salvady

Mr. Karun Salvady is a distinction graduate in Neuroscience from the University of Texas at Austin. He has an extensive research background in translational medicine, drug delivery and pharmaceutics and has worked at some of the premier medical institutes in the U.S. including the Baylor College of Medicine, Dell Medical School, National Institutes of Health and UT Austin College of Natural Sciences during his undergraduate tenure. He has delivered award winning presentations across the world at decorated institutions such as Harvard University, The University of Texas at Austin, Butler University, Qatar University, The National Institutes of Health, The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences and the National Conference on Medicine and Religion. He is also a published scientific author in the field of translational medicine.

Aside from his academic and professional achievements, Mr. Salvady is also a reputed South Indian classical (Carnatic) percussionist, an exponent of the mridangam, and has performed in over 500+ concerts with many of India’s leading musicians across the U.S., U.K. and India. Some of the noted musicians he has accompanied in the field of Indian classical music include Ganesh Rajagopalan (of Ganesh-Kumaresh fame), Flute Raman, AS Murali and Madurai R. Sundar, to name a few. He has also collaborated with musicians from genres such as Western classical, jazz, flamenco and pop, conducted workshops and lecture-demonstrations, recorded for albums and currently teaches South Indian percussion to earnest students in the US. He is currently completing a master’s degree at Goldsmiths, University of London in the unique Music, Mind & Brain program focused on music psychology and the cognitive neuroscience of musical behavior, where he is conducting cutting edge research on the intersection of music and the brain. His interests outside of academics and music include traveling, NBA basketball, food and spirituality.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Student, Mr. Salvady will be working on interdisciplinary research with aims to investigate the impact of South Indian Classical percussion listening on mental health outcomes. This project aims to pioneer efforts in developing a novel music listening protocol using South Indian Classical (Carnatic) rhythms to potentially aid mental health outcomes of neuropsychiatric patients. Cognitive deficits and low mood are common amongst patients with Schizophrenia, Parkinson’s Disease and Stroke recovery. Research has shown that music listening interventions can have beneficial effects on outcomes of mental health, especially on mood and cognition. Carnatic music listening interventions have yet to be experimented, with a particular lack of exploration using the rhythmic components of such music. Combining these approaches may open the way for further investigation in this area.

Sumathi Ramaswamy

Prof. Sumathi Ramaswamy is James B. Duke Professor of History, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. She has published extensively on language politics, gender studies, spatial studies and the history of cartography, visual studies and the modern history of art, and more recently, digital humanities and the history of philanthropy in modern India. She holds a master’s degree in History and MPhil in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; a Master’s in Anthropology from University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in History from the University of California (Berkeley). Prior to her appointment at Duke Univeristy, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Between 2002 and 2005, she also worked for the Ford Foundation in New Delhi as Program Officer for Education, Arts and Culture. Her monographs include Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India (1997); The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (2004); The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (2010), Husain’s Raj: Postcolonial Visions of Empire and Nation (2016); and Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe (2017). She is a co-founder of Tasveerghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture. Her most recent works are Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience (New Delhi: Roli Books), a digital project on children’s art titled B is for Bapu: Gandhi in the Art of the Child in Modern India, and a co-edited volume (with Monica Juneja) titled Motherland: Pushpamala N.’s Woman and Nation (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2022). She is currently working on a new project on educational philanthropy in British India.

Focusing on India’s first educational trust named Pachaiyappa’s Charities and on its connection to the man after whom it is named, Pachaiyappa Mudaliar (d. 1794), Prof. Ramaswamy’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to chart the birth of educational philanthropy in nineteenth-century Tamil India. She analyzes the emergence of secular education as a desirable public good; the transformation in the age of colonial capital of ancestral ideas about virtuous giving; and the political, economic, and ethical motivations for philanthropic support for secular education. She also considers questions endemic to philanthropy about power and personal influence as she delineates the role of private wealth in underwriting public education.

Venkateswaran Narayanaswamy

Dr. Venkat Narayanaswamy is an Associate Professor of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at North Carolina State University. He obtained his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin and bachelor’s degree at IIT Madras, both in Aerospace Engineering. He was a postdoctoral fellow at RWTH Aachen, Germany, before joining the faculty of North Carlina State University.

Dr. Narayanaswamy’s research is in the area of combustion and aerodynamics. He focuses on complex processes of turbulent flows with emphasis on emerging clean energy and future transport. His work emphasizes advancing the current state of the art using cutting edge measurement technologies. The tools that were developed in his lab provided novel insights into the underlying flow and chemical processes that cause soot emissions. These tools will be extended to the host institution to obtain foundational understanding of the chemical processes that trigger forest fires and the aerodynamic interactions that cause the fires to spread over large geographic areas. This research can significantly advance the ability to predict the occurrence and spread of forest fires that will help develop early fire warning systems and fire probability maps that can help strategize future regional development.

Dr. Narayanaswamy has authored over 80 publications in this topical area, including an Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics article in 2014. He has been recognized with numerous research awards and honors including the AFRL Summer Faculty Fellowship (2022), AFOSR Young Investigator Award (2016), and ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowship (2016). He is also an alumnus of National Academy of Engineering’s US Frontiers of Engineering, Class of 2020. Dr. Narayanaswamy also served as an international coordinator on the SPARC award in India and is among the invitees of the VAIBHAV meet organized by the government of India.

A multiscale multi-organization research initiative is proposed to leap the current state of the art on the forecast and early warning of Indian forest fires. Dr. Narayanaswamy’s Fulbright-Nehru research aims to focus on making quantitative predictions of fire initiation probabilities and spreading rates in representative sub-Himalayan vegetation, weather, and terrain conditions. The objectives include: 1) Develop ab-initio chemical kinetics models for gasification and pyrolysis of representative organic vegetation. 2) Obtain models for crown fire initiation and spreading that are tuned for representative wind conditions and terrain. 3) Incorporate the model into in-house or commercial software and validate with existing data.

Sulapha Peethamparan

Dr. Sulapha Peethamparan is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Clarkson University, New York. She received her PhD from Purdue University, MEng from the National University of Singapore, MS from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and BTech from Mahatma Gandhi University, all in civil engineering. Prior to joining Clarkson University, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University. Dr. Peethamparan has over 15 years of research and teaching experience in cement, aggregate, and concrete materials. Her recent work involves various aspects of the development of alternative or low carbon concrete such as high-volume fly ash concrete, bio-cement concrete, alkali-activated or geopolymers concrete. The primary objectives of these studies are to determine the fresh, hardened, and durability performances of such low carbon concrete and their underlying physiochemical mechanisms. Her expertise also includes CO2/NOx sequestration technologies in concrete. Dr. Peethamparan’s research work has been supported by various agencies that include the National Science Foundation, the Federal Highway Administration, New York State Energy Research and Department Authority, and New York State Pollution Prevention Institute. She has authored/co-authored over 100 technical papers and reports. Dr. Peethamparan is also an associate editor of the ASCE Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering, chair of the Concrete Research Counsel at the American Concrete Institute, and fellow of the American Concrete Institute. She is a recipient of the 2010 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development award.

The environmental impact of CO2 emission from portland cement production and the role of the concrete industry in global warming sparked the need to develop more sustainable, alternative low carbon concrete for construction. India, the second-largest cement producer in the world, reported an emission of over 250 million metric tons of CO2 in the year 2020. The main objective of this Fulbright research is to explore the viability of producing low carbon portland cement-free geopolymer concrete using locally available industrial byproducts in India and solid alkali activators through the one-part alkali activation technology. In her project, Dr. Peethamparan is also developing new course material covering several alternative cement technologies.

Aditi Anand

Aditi Anand is an undergraduate student majoring in computer engineering at Purdue University. She is also pursuing a minor in biology and a concentration in artificial intelligence (AI). Aditi intends to pursue a career in healthcare and is specifically interested in applications of AI in the field of medicine. Her research has explored creating more brain-like artificial neural networks; improving the robustness of AI models used in medical imaging; and early and low-cost diagnosis of congestive heart failure. Aditi has received the Presidential Scholarship, Paul and Peggy Reising Scholarship, Stimson Family Scholarship, and Charles W. Brown Scholarship, all from Purdue University. She has also received the National Honorable Mention Award for Aspirations in Computing from the National Center for Women & Information Technology and the Sigma Xi Top STEM Talk Award at the Purdue Spring Undergraduate Research Conference. Aditi has served as a crisis intervention specialist for Mental Health America; as an emergency room volunteer at the IU Arnett Hospital, Lafayette; as vice chair of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, Purdue Student Chapter; as vice president of WorldHealth Purdue; and as event coordinator for the Indian Classical Music Association at Purdue. She has also volunteered for Udavum Karangal, Chennai, organizing personal hygiene and health awareness workshops, and for the Ankit Foundation Corp to develop a mobile app for mental health.

In her Fulbright-Nehru program, Aditi is working with the Robert Bosch Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Indian Institute of Technology (RBC-DSAI) in Chennai to develop a high-performing AI model that can be deployed in Indian clinical conditions to diagnose breast cancer through low-cost mammograms. The model that she is developing with Dr. Balaraman Ravindran’s team at RBC-DSAI seeks to overcome the challenges that India and other countries face due to lack of resources and access to radiologists.

Pavana Prabhakar

Dr. Pavana Prabhakar is the Charles G. Salmon Associate Professor in the departments of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she leads the Manufacturing and Mechanics Lab. She received her PhD in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan in 2013 and her MS in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California in 2008. She received her BTech in civil engineering from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka in 2007.

Dr. Prabhakar has more than 15 years of research and teaching experience in composite materials with a specific focus on mechanics and advanced manufacturing. Her vision is to advance fundamental science for engineering damage-tolerant and resilient lightweight structures and materials for diverse applications in the aerospace, marine, wind, and automotive sectors. Her research occurs at the intersection of solid mechanics, advanced manufacturing, materials science, and computational science, and has been published regularly in reputed journals like Composites Part B, Composites Science and Technology, Materials & Design, Composite Structures, and Communications Materials.

Dr. Prabhakar has received numerous awards for her research, including the prestigious NSF CAREER (2021), ONR Young Investigator Program (2019), and AFOSR Young Investigator Program (2015). She is also the recipient of the 2019 American Society for Composites’ Young Composites Researcher Award given to an early-career member of the composites community who has significantly impacted the science and technology of composite materials through sustained research efforts. She also serves as an associate editor for Composites Part B. She is actively involved in the American Society for Composites and serves on its executive board as the membership secretary.

Dr. Prabhakar’s Fulbright-Nehru project is conducting fundamental research toward enabling greener and more sustainable solutions for next-generation composite materials, particularly natural fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composites, a critical study and opportunity area. This project is set to establish the fundamental process–structure–property relationships of natural FRP composite materials, thereby accelerating their widespread use and durability.

Sirish Namilae

Dr. Sirish Namilae is a professor of aerospace engineering at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU). He obtained his MS in materials science from the Indian Institute of Science and a PhD in mechanical engineering from Florida State University. He joined the Aerospace Engineering Department at Embry-Riddle in 2014 after 10 years of experience in industry (Boeing) and national lab (Oak Ridge National Laboratory). At ERAU, Dr. Namilae leads the Advanced Materials and Mechanics Group and directs the composites lab. His research has focused on areas of composite materials and complex systems, as well as multiscale modeling. He has authored about 100 journal and conference publications in these research areas and has trained eight PhD and 20 MS thesis students. He has generated more than USD 6 million in research funding over the last few years. Dr. Namilae won ERAU’s Abbas–Sivjee Outstanding Researcher award in 2022. He is also an AIAA associate fellow.

In his Fulbright research fellowship, Prof. Namilae is collaborating with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras researchers to establish a novel foundation for interfacial design of next-generation composites. The research is pioneering the development of biodegradable natural fiber composites featuring nanoscale interfacial features. Additionally, Prof. Namilae is conducting novel experiments and formulating models to study interfacial mechanics and creating design maps that correlate nanoscale features with the desired composite properties. The outcomes of this research will provide guidance for optimal interface design of robust, multifunctional composites, including eco-friendly natural fiber composites.