India Fellows Years: Indian Fellows 2022-2023

Nandakumar Kalarikkal

Dr. Nandakumar Kalarikkal is a Professor at the School of Pure and Applied Physics at Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU), Kottayam, Kerala. He serves as a member of the University Syndicate (a statutory body of MGU), the Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC), the University Research Committee (URC), and the University Centre for International Cooperation (UCIC). His areas of research interest are nanostructured materials and applications; water, food and health security; circular economy; climate change; laser-matter interactions and computational nanoscience, and nanotechnology. He has organized several international seminars and workshops at MGU and delivered lectures at national and international conferences. He is the recipient of a number of national and international research awards and grants and has established state-of-the-art research facilities at MGU. Dr. Kalarikkal has supervised 30 master’s thesis and 25 doctoral dissertations. He holds six patents, and he has authored more than 30 books. He has produced more than 400 peer-reviewed publications with an H-index of 43 and 7,000 citations. He received a Master of Science degree in Industrial Physics and a PhD in Semiconductor Physics from Cochin University of Science and Technology, Kochi, Kerala.

Home Institution: Mahatma Gandhi University is a state public university in Kottayam, Kerala. Established in 1983, the university offers a range of programs at the postgraduate, MPhil and PhD levels. In 2020, MGU wan the Chancellor’s Award for Best University in Kerala, and The National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), the highest body of assessment and accreditation for higher education in India, granted MGU an A grade. In 2022, the National Institution Ranking Framework (NIRF) by the Indian Ministry of Education ranked MGU at the 31st position for the “university” category, and 52nd for the “overall” category.

Rajnish Jain

Dr. Rajnish Jain is Secretary at the University Grants Commission (UGC), which is the highest regulatory agency for higher education in India. Under his stewardship, the UGC has made significant advances in promoting quality higher education and implementing the National Education Policy 2020 in areas of multidisciplinary and holistic education, governance and curricular reforms, internationalization, skill education, digitalization of higher education, along with increasing access and promotion of gender and social equity in higher education. For over 33 years, Dr. Jain has made significant contributions as a teacher, researcher, trainer, administrator, and policymaker. Before his appointment as Secretary of UGC, he was a Professor at the Institute of Management Studies at Devi Ahilya University, Indore, and Nirma University, Ahmedabad, among other institutions. He has developed several academic courses and programs and has organized management development and training programs for organization of the public and private sector. His research and publications are in quality education, value-based education, services management, strategic management, and customer experience. He has guided 15 PhD research scholars. He represented India in numerous bilateral and multilateral forums for effective external stakeholder relationships and strategic engagement with foreign countries.

Home Institution: The University Grants Commission was established by an Act of Parliament in 1956 and is a statutory body under the aegis of the Indian Ministry of Education. The organization is responsible for coordination, determination and maintenance of standards of higher education in the country. India has a large postsecondary education system with more than 1,000 universities and over 42,000 colleges. The number of students enrolled in higher education is currently about 40 million across India. The UGC undertakes initiatives for access, equity, quality, affordability, accountability, excellence, and internationalization in higher education. It provides regulatory architecture, policy frameworks and guidelines, along with financial support to higher education institutions, faculty members and students. The UGC’s main office is in New Delhi, and it has six regional centers in Bhopal, Pune, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Guwahati, and Bengaluru.

Sanyogita Chadha

Dr. Sanyogita Chadha is a Professor of Fashion Design and the Regional Director at Pearl Academy, Bengaluru, Karnataka. She has a PhD in Anthropometry and has over three decades of experience in the fashion industry and academia. Dr. Chadha has held leadership positions at Karnavati University, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, and at the Gurukul School of Design, Jaipur, Rajasthan. She is a Board Member of Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, Gujarat, and she is on the Advisory Board at STYLUMIA, an Artificial Intelligence Company that offers analytics solutions for the fashion industry. She has been a jury member for PhD candidates at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, a federal public institute established in 2006.

Home Institution: Pearl Academy is an autonomous institution in the field of creative education with schools of design, fashion, contemporary media, and creative practice. With campuses in Delhi, Jaipur, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, the institution has received awards and recognition for design education from business organizations and the media. There are currently over 3,000 students enrolled across its four campuses.

Sadhana Naithani

Dr. Sadhana Naithani is a Professor at the Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. She is the Coordinator of the Folklore Unit at JNU, an Honorary Fellow of the American Folklore Society, and the current President of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research.

She did her Ph.D. in the field of German Folkloristics. She has been interested in the transformation of the concept of folklore in different historical contexts-under British colonialism, in Germany after World War II, and in the Baltic countries under Soviet occupation. She is the author of In Quest of Indian Folktales (Indiana University Press, 2006), The Story Time of the British Empire (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), Folklore Theory in Post-war Germany (University Press of Mississippi, 2014) and Folklore in Baltic History, Resistance and Resurgence (University Press of Mississippi, 2019). Her novella: Elephantine (Red Squirrel Press, 2016) is based on her research in colonial forestry led by German scientists in British India. She is on the editorial boards of journals Marvels and Tales, Cultural Analysis, and Journal of the School of Languages.

Dr. Naithani is deeply interested in the relationship of human and non-human beings experienced in cultural-political contexts and expressed in narratives. As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar at University of California, Berkeley, she will explore the narratives of British colonizers about the wild non-human animals of the colonies. She will teach a graduate course in the Fall Semester and an undergraduate course in the Spring Semester around her research theme.

Manjusha V. Shelke

Dr. Manjusha Shelke is working as Principal Scientist in the Physical and Materials Chemistry division of CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory, Pune. Dr. Shelke is also an Associate Professor at AcSIR. She has completed her Ph.D. in chemistry from CSIR-Advanced Materials and Processes Research Institute, Bhopal in 2006. She has worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Institut d’électronique de Microélectronique et de anotechnologie, CNRS, Lille, France during 2007-08 sponsored by Embassy of France in India. She has been awarded a visiting scholarship in chemical sciences by Indo-US Science and Technology Forum and worked at Rice University, Houston, TX, USA during 2013-14. She has been elected as Kavli Fellow by National Academy of Sciences, USA in 2015 and as a Fellow of Maharashtra Academy of Sciences in 2018. In 2021 Science and Engineering Research Board of Govt. of India awarded her with SERB-POWER Fellowship. She has been invited as a Visiting Faculty at Automotive Research Association of India (ARAI) academy since 2020 and on the research advisory board of Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Bhopal in 2022. She is a materials’ chemist and her research interests are in the development of high energy electrode materials for storage devices like rechargeable batteries and supercapacitors. She has published 70 journal articles, eight book chapters, six patents granted and 10 invention disclosures filed. 11 of her students graduated with PhD. In 2021, she has founded a spin-off company “Rechargion Energy Pvt. Ltd.” to take research from her lab to the market.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence research fellow, Dr. Shelke aims to understand the failure mechanisms in Lithium-Sulphur rechargeable battery cells, address them with interfacial engineering strategies and develop a working prototype with reasonable cycle life and high specific energy.

Shiju Sam Varughese

Dr. Shiju Sam Varughese is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Studies in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (CSSTIP) in the School of Social Sciences of Central University of Gujarat (CUG), Gandhinagar. After receiving basic training in biology, he completed his M.Phil research on People’s Science Movements (PSMs) and doctoral research on public controversies over science in media from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Dr. Varughese works on issues related to science and democracy by employing concepts and tools from History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science. He has authored Contested Knowledge: Science, Media, and Democracy in Kerala (Oxford University Press, 2017) and co-edited Kerala Modernity: Ideas, Spaces and Practices in Transition (Orient Blackswan, 2015). His current research interests include public engagement with science and technology, risk governance, new social movements, social history of knowledge, science and technology in popular culture, and regional modernities.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship, Dr. Varughese will theorise how the post-disaster societies develop new practices of care to reconstruct their life in the context of the pesticide disaster caused by the aerial spraying of Endosulfan in the cashew plantations in Kasaragod district of Kerala. He will argue that the practices of the community in the post-disaster reconstructive phase will be helpful in developing a new participatory model of risk governance to survive recurrent disasters.

Sarbeswar Sahoo

Dr. Sarbeswar Sahoo is working as an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He was Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Erfurt (Germany) and Charles Wallace Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast (UK). He received his Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore and has held Visiting Fellowships at University of Groningen (Netherlands), University of Cardiff (UK), University of Muenster (Germany), University of Erfurt (Germany), Roskilde University (Denmark), Queen’s University Belfast (UK), and NUS (Singapore). His research interests include Neoliberalism, Sociology of Development, and Sociology of Religion. He is the author of Civil Society and Democratization in India (Routledge, 2013) and Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

During his Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship, Dr. Sahoo aims to compare the experiences of Bhil Pentecostals in India and Black Pentecostals in the US and discuss how different cultural contexts influence peoples’ lived religious experiences and how Pentecostalism is transforming the everyday socio-political lifeworld of people at the margins. A comparison of the Bhils with the experiences of Black Pentecostals in the US will help us understand not just the “contextual” nature of religious experiences and activities, but also the relationships between religion, state and secularism.

Sharmistha Saha

Sharmistha Saha is assistant professor of Performance Studies at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai. She completed her PhD from the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany. Erasmus Mundus followed by the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded her doctoral study. Later, she was a DFG postdoctoral fellow at Dahlem Research School, Berlin, Germany. She has been a UGC Junior Research Fellow at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. In the past she has been a Becas MAEC-AECID fellow at the Universidad de Granada, Spain. Her research interests include theatre historiography, performance philosophy, colonial theatre, theories of acting, aesthetics and politics, archive and the arts and critical theory. She is the author of Theatre and National Identity in Colonial India: Formation of a community through cultural practice (Springer/Aakar, 2017). Sharmistha is also a theatre practitioner and some of her directorial work includes ‘Playing to Bombay’ co-created with Sunil Shanbag, ‘Her Letters’ commissioned by the Tagore Centre in Berlin, ‘Romeo Ravidas aur Juliet Devi’ amongst others. She most recently was part of the international inter-medial project ‘Elephants in Rooms’ facilitated by the German-UK based Gobs Squad Arts Collective. She has closely worked with the theatre stalwart Eugenio Barba and his company Odin Teatret in Denmark.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship Sharmistha will be working on the project ‘Community identity, cultural performance and value: politics of intercultural exchange between the ‘west’ and postcolonial India’ at the TISCH School of the Arts, New York University. Her work will focus on politics of community identity, cultural performances as inheritance and its associated value in the context of ‘intercultural theatre’.

Vineeth N Balasubramanian

Dr. Vineeth N Balasubramanian is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad (IIT-H), and currently serves as the Head of the Department of Artificial Intelligence at IIT-H. His research interests include deep learning, machine learning, and computer vision. His research has resulted in many publications in several top conferences and journals including ICML, CVPR, NeurIPS, ICCV, AAAI, TPAMI, etc. His Ph.D. dissertation at Arizona State University on the Conformal Predictions framework was nominated for the Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation at the Department of Computer Science. His recent awards include: Best Paper Awards at CODS-COMAD 2022, CVPR 2021 workshops on Causality in Vision and Adversarial Machine Learning; Teaching Excellence Awards at IIT-H in 2017 and 2021; Google Research Scholar Award (earlier known as Google Research Faculty award) in 2020; Outstanding Reviewer Awards at ICLR 2021, CVPR 2019, ECCV 2020. For more details, please see https://iith.ac.in/~vineethnb/.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship, Dr. Balasubramanian aims to work towards developing trustworthy machine learning models that are implicitly imbued with causal reasoning capabilities. In particular, he plans to understand and develop methods for causal generative mechanisms in real-world data, and bring together perspectives of causality and robustness into explanations of deep neural network models.

Sathesh Mariappan

Dr. Sathesh Mariappan is currently serving as an Associate Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He completed his Bachelors at Madras Institute of Technology, 2007 (University First Rank) and obtained his Ph.D. from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, 2012, both in Aerospace Engineering. Before joining IIT Kanpur, he worked in the German Aerospace Center, Goettingen as a Humboldt Post Doctoral fellow. He is a recipient of Young Engineer Awards from the Indian National Academy of Engineering and Institution of Engineers. He is also recognized internationally through the Humboldt Fellowship and International Exchanges award (co-applicant) from The Royal Society – London. His research focuses on understanding and mitigating combustion-driven oscillations in gas turbine engines.

During the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Dr. Mariappan will specialize in applying physics informed neural network (PINN): a machine learning method, to study combustion driven oscillations in combustors of gas turbine engines. PINN is an emerging tool, having the striking advantage to synergize experimental data and physics-based models. This synergy brings a new understanding of flame-flow interactions and helps develop more accurate hybrid models, which serve for instability prognosis and mitigation. This alternative (superior) hybrid framework will model combustor dynamics more accurately (than models derived purely from theory or experiments), even in practical systems, leading to efficient/robust control of oscillations.