Host Institution USA: Indian Institute of Technology Madras

Ajay Nathan

Ajay Nathan, originally from Marietta, Georgia, studied science, technology, and international affairs at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, with a concentration in global health and biotechnology. He is passionate about expanding and improving healthcare access globally through the use of digital technologies and holistic models of care. In his senior year, Ajay completed his undergraduate honors thesis investigating the effectiveness of digital health platforms during and since the COVID-19 pandemic in India. Concurrently, he was conducting research at the Georgetown Medical Center, looking at how the knockdown of cellular communication may limit tumor growth in mice.

Ajay has participated in various research fellowships at Georgetown. He has also served as president of DCivitas Consulting, a pro bono nonprofit consulting firm that works with D.C.-based nonprofits. Besides, he has guided prospective students as a tour guide and new students as an orientation advisor; he has also been involved in student organizations such as the South Asian Society. In his free time, Ajay enjoys creative writing, hiking, jogging, and exploring cafes.

Ajay’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is looking at the potential use of telemedicine in hospice care and palliative care within Tamil Nadu. The project is identifying palliative care centers (PCCs) across the state to conduct a qualitative assessment of the current status of hospice and palliative care. Apart from reviewing public health records, the project is holding interviews with healthcare practitioners and PCC patients across the state, in government hospitals, government community centers, and private community centers. The aim is to identify the larger trends regarding the efficacy of telemedicine in the treatment of hospice and palliative care patients.

Carsten A. Ullrich

Dr. Carsten Ullrich is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Missouri. He obtained his PhD in theoretical physics in 1995 from the University of Würzburg, Germany, under the supervision of Professor E.K.U. Gross, and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with Professor Walter Kohn (winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry). In 2001, he joined the University of Missouri as an assistant professor; in 2007, he received tenure; and in 2013, was promoted to full professor of physics. Dr. Ullrich’s main area of research is in theoretical and computational condensed-matter physics; specifically, he is interested in describing light–matter interactions and magnetic excitations using first-principles quantum mechanical approaches. For this purpose, he develops and uses methodologies based on the density functional theory. He has authored over 120 journal publications and a textbook on time-dependent density functional theory. In 2015, he was named a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Amy Allocco

Prof. Amy Allocco is professor of religious studies and director of the Multifaith Scholars Program at Elon University which she joined in 2009. She is the 2019 recipient of the university’s Ward Family Excellence in Mentoring Award. In 2021, Elon’s College of Arts and Sciences honored her with the Excellence in Scholarship Award, while in 2012, she received the Excellence in Teaching Award. Professor Allocco teaches courses on the religions of South Asia, particularly Hinduism. She earned her PhD from Emory University, MTS from Harvard Divinity School, and BA from Colgate University.

Prof. Allocco is an anthropologist of religion who studies contemporary Hindu ritual and religious practices in Tamil Nadu. Her book project, Living with the Dead in Hindu South India, focuses on ceremonies to honor deceased relatives in which ritual drummers summon the spirit, convince it to possess a human host, and beg it to come home as a permanent family deity. Fellowships from Fulbright-Nehru and the American Institute of Indian Studies supported Professor Allocco’s research for her “domesticating the dead” project, which features in an article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Besides her co-edited volume, Ritual Innovation: Strategic Interventions in South Asian Religion (SUNY Press, 2018, with Brian K. Pennington), she co-edited a 2020 issue of the journal Fieldwork in Religion on the theme “Shifting Sites, Shifting Selves: The Intersections of Homes and Fields in the Ethnography of India” (with Jennifer D. Ortegren) and has another co-edited volume under contract with SUNY titled Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices (with Xenia Zeiler).

Prof. Allocco’s Fulbright-Nehru project is an ethnographic study analyzing the ritual, musical, and storytelling practices of three generations of Tamil Hindu drummer-priests called pampaikkārar to understand a performance tradition in transition. Through eight months of fieldwork in Tamil-speaking South India, she is exploring the creation, transmission, and refashioning of this family’s musical and ritual repertoires, and is examining what these dynamic processes reveal about shifting religious sentiments, aesthetic preferences, and socioeconomic conditions. She is also focusing on the co-constitutive nature of the drummer-priests’ ritual efficacy and musical virtuosity as well as on intergenerational learning and social media experimentation. Her resulting ethnography will delineate how changing religious, narrative, and visual tastes and relationships with technology are reshaping the contours of Tamil devotional performance culture.

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.