Host Institution USA: St. John’s Medical College

Anna Correa

Ms. Anna Correa is a recent graduate of the University of Iowa College of Public Health where she received a Masters of Public Health in Community and Behavioral Health. She previously completed bachelor’s degrees in public health and international relations (transnational issues emphasis) at the University of Iowa. Ms. Correa’s educational background includes work in migration, qualitative research methods, and community-engaged public health. During her time in college, Ms. Correa worked for the University of Iowa Prevention Research Center for Rural Health where she assisted in the implementation of a community-based physical activity program. She is the Principal Investigator for a research study examining the impact of COVID-19 on student resident assistants in university dorms.

Outside of academics, Ms. Correa was deeply involved in her community, serving as the President for Iowa Agni South Asian A Cappella group, Co-Chair of the University Lecture Committee, and member of many additional groups. In 2021, Ms. Correa began studying Hindi through the Critical Language Scholarship and will continue her studies in 2022 with the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship.

Ms. Correa loves people, and she tries to get to know everyone she can. She looks forward to her time in Bangalore and hopes to meet many new friends in her time there.

As Bangalore continues to grow, the migrant population increases but the support for migrant laborer well-being has not kept pace. Ms. Correa, as part of her Fulbright-Nehru project, aims to conduct qualitative research with three unique migrant groups: i) construction workers, ii) artisans, and iii) information technology employees. In doing so, Ms. Correa hopes to better understand the needs of migrant laborers in the city and build relationships between researchers at St. John’s and members of the migrant worker community.

Kathleen O’Reilly

Dr. Kathleen O’Reilly is a professor in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University and is its presidential impact fellow. She has over 25 years of research experience in gender, and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions in rural and urban India. She is trained as a feminist geographer, ethnographer, and South Asia scholar. Her qualitative research on gender norms has identified new information regarding the negative influence of these norms on physical, environmental, social, and sexual stressors related to WASH. Over the course of her career, she has sought an in-depth understanding of internal community and household dynamics when it comes to control and access to resources, like time and toilets, for women and the socially marginalized groups. Her research highlights the need to understand the complexities of social relations and sanitation policy as they pertain to spatial patterns of inequality in WASH. Recently, she created and taught short workshops on best practices for research on sensitive topics based on her ethnographic research in India. Her work has been funded by, among others, the National Science Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She has also published in such prestigious journals as Geoforum, Health & Place, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Environment & Urbanization, Water Security, and World Development.

In rural India, where conditions require women’s intensive, unpaid domestic work, it is urgent to study how it reproduces gender inequality; this will also add to the global knowledge on unpaid labor’s gendered impact. Dr. O’Reilly’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the workloads of unmarried and married rural young women; the latter living in matrilocal or patrilocal households. Despite evidence that access to leisure time contributes to women’s well-being, a large gap remains regarding young women’s leisure activities in rural India. This project is attempting to fill that gap by analyzing the gendered geographies of domestic labor and leisure. It is also making a methodological contribution by recording the work and leisure conditions of populations with low literacy through audio diaries.

Anna Kozan

Anna Kozan is graduating in May 2024 with a BS in nursing and a BA in Spanish language studies from Ramapo College of New Jersey (RCNJ). In her Spanish studies program, she conducted research on the intersection of language and health, and the potentially detrimental outcomes that can occur when patients speak a different language from their care providers. In 2023, she completed a Critical Language Scholarship (CLS), Spark, to study Russian. She is now volunteering as a CLS alumni ambassador and advertising the program through social media and by hosting events. She has been working as a patient care technician at a hospital in New Jersey since October 2022 and developing her clinical skills to help her in her career as a nurse. Anna also works as a Spanish tutor at Ramapo College. Besides, she is the social media chair of the RCNJ Spanish Club. She is also a member of the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing and of the Sigma Delta Pi National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society. Anna is fluent in Spanish and holds an intermediate mid-proficiency in Russian, as well as a novice high proficiency in Arabic and the American Sign Language. She is also a choreographer and performer for the RCNJ Dance Company.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Anna is researching if language barriers in India’s Karnataka state is affecting patient care, health literacy, and health outcomes. Working with Dr. Archana Siddaiah at St. John’s Medical College in Bengaluru, she is interviewing healthcare workers at the college to determine their experiences with language barriers and patient care. She is also interviewing patients to find out whether they are experiencing problems in care due to language barriers. The goal of the project is to implement community-based solutions for the issues that are identified.