Indian Fellows 2022-2023 Archives - Page 2 of 16

Rojalin Padhan

Ms. Rojalin Padhan is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar, Odisha. Her doctoral thesis focuses on phenomenological implications of beyond the Standard Model theories, the theory of neutrino mass generation, and dark matter. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed international journals, and she has presented at several national and international conferences.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Gangadhar Meher College, Sambalpur, Odisha, and a master’s degree in Physics from Sambalpur University, Odisha. She has qualified in examinations such as the JEST, Joint CSIR-UGC JRF-NET, and GATE. She also holds a Diploma in Advanced Physics from the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar, Odisha.

Apart from Physics, she has an interest in social work. She enjoys spending time on the beach and in the mountains, as well as gardening. She loves to travel to different places and to meet people of various cultures.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, she is exploring the potential reach of the proposed multi-TeV Muon Collider to search for beyond the Standard Model particles. She is primarily working on collider signatures of models that predict dark matter candidates and address the origin of the observed neutrino masses.

Nijesh P

Mr. Nijesh P is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geology, Centre for Advanced Study, Institute of Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. Nijesh specializes in hydrogeology. He is well-versed in hydrological field investigation, hydrogeochemical analysis, hydrogeochemical modelling, remote sensing and GIS, mineral identification and exploration, and geophysical survey. He has published papers in various reputed national and international journals. The most recent one deals with the study of isotopic characteristics and water quality with emphasis on fluoride in the water-scarce Lalitpur district of the Bundelkhand region in India.

Nijesh holds a master’s degree in Applied Geology from Anna University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, where he passed with first class. He has worked as a Junior Research fellow at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, before enrolling into his doctorate program. He is a hodophile and loves to explore new destinations. He also has a keen interest in music and is an amateur guitarist.

Nijesh is pursuing a doctoral program on “Hydrogeological and Isotopic evolution of springs and their management strategies in a micro watershed of Kosi River basin at Kumaun Lesser Himalaya Uttarakhand, India.” He is widening his research data and inferences further at Penn State University through the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship. The research opens a new door toward the methodologies and parameters used in hydrogeology for the study of springs.

Ankita Nandi

Ms. Ankita Nandi is a Ph.D. scholar at the NeuRonICS Lab, Department of Electronic Systems engineering (DESE), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. She is interested in designing low power VLSI circuits using digital, analog and mixed signal techniques for error resilient applications. She takes keen interest in computations in the probabilistic domain and is developing circuits which accommodate them. Apart from these, she is also interested in approximate computing, image processing applications and error correction decoders. She has communicated and published her work in prestigious international journals and conferences.

Ms. Nandi has been the 5th rank holder in her pre-university board examinations. She received her B.Tech. in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Meghalaya with the President Gold Medal and the Institute Gold Medal. She completed her M.Tech. from the Electrical Engineering Department of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Gandhinagar. She has also been selected as the Prime Minister’s Research Fellow (PMRF) in August 2021 and is availing this scholarship instead of the institutional fellowship.

Ms. Nandi wants to design a low power Analog Neuromorphic Probabilistic Processor for real-time deployment in portable and hand-held products during her tenure of Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship.

Additionally, Nandi is an avid orator and holds a diploma in painting. Being a food lover, Nandi also enjoys cooking different cuisines and loves listening to music.

Chinar Mehta

Ms. Chinar Mehta is a doctoral scholar and Research Assistant, working at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. She has presented at conferences and seminars held by the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), and Frames of Reference organized by the School of Media and Cultural Studies, TISS. In 2021, she was also selected to be part of the Doctoral Colloquium at the annual AoIR conference. As a Research Assistant at FemLabCo, she researches labor conditions in the sanitation sector in Hyderabad. FemLabCo is a research project funded by the International Development Research Centre which research how digital tools can be leveraged by women workers to get better bargaining power in a precarious labor market.

Ms. Mehta’s doctoral research pertains to the people, tools, and practices involved in software development, and what that means for the design new media technologies. For this, she draws from theoretical work in feminist media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies. She continues this research at Carnegie Mellon University with Dr Sarah Fox, to get guidance with interdisciplinary research that aims to make meaningful and specific claims about what technologies allow and disallow.

Ms. Mehta received her masters’ degree in Media and Cultural Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences at Mumbai. She has received prior training in Information and Communication Technology through her bachelors’ degree from Dhirubhai Ambani Insitute of Information and Communication Technology. She worked as a software developer for 2 years before joining TISS.

Chandrashekhar Lakavath

Mr. Chandrashekhar Lakavath is a Ph.D. scholar at the Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology-Hyderabad (IIT-Hyderabad), Telangana. He holds M.Tech. in Structural Engineering from Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, in 2018 and a B.Tech. in Civil Engineering from JNTUH College of Engineering-Manthani, Telangana, in 2015. He worked as a graduate engineer trainee at Patil Rail Infrastructure Pvt. Ltd and has research experience of one year at IIT Hyderabad under the guidance of Prof. S. Suriya Prakash.

He is interested in developing Ultra high-performance concrete (UHPC), Lightweight concrete, and guidelines for shear design. Currently, he is working on understanding the shear behavior of post-tensioned ultra-high-performance fiber reinforced concrete beams. He also developed a UHPC concrete using locally available materials in India, which is most needed in the construction industry. He has published seven reputed peer-reviewed international journals and four international conference proceedings.

Mr. Lakavath received the best research work awards for two consecutive years at Civil Conclave 2020 and 2021, organized by IIT Roorkee. He received the prestigious Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship (PMRF) and National Fellowship and Scholarship for Higher Education of ST Students (NFST) for his doctoral research. Mr. Lakavath has collaborations with Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, IOWA State University, Cleveland State University and the University of Birmingham.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow, Lakavath will be developing a shear capacity prediction model for post-tensioned ultra-high performance concrete beams. It will fulfil the need for both design and research engineers to estimate the shear capacity of bridge girders.

Sourav Kumar

Mr. Sourav Kumar is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam. His doctoral research focuses on the evaluation of earthquake-induced changes in groundwater composition, commonly known as hydro-geochemical earthquake precursors (associated with the slow accumulation of tectonic stress in the Earth’s crust) in northeast India.

Mr. Kumar obtained his bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering at Uttarakhand Technical University, Dehradun, in 2016. He completed his master’s degree in Earth System Science and Engineering under the Department of Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam, in 2018. He received the MHRD-GATE Fellowship for two years of his M.Tech. in 2016, where he studied the spatio-temporal variability in India’s groundwater storage using GRACE data. As his research expanded and segued into his doctoral research, he has presented his work at international conferences in 2019 and 2021.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, his primary objective is to understand the links between earthquakes and hydrological/hydro-geochemical variation that could be used as basic scientific input required for an impending earthquake prediction at both national and international levels. The proposed study could be used to correlate datasets from northeast India with those from other parts of the world such as Iceland, Japan, Korea, Italy, China, and the United States, that have reported similar earthquake-induced changes in groundwater composition.

In addition to his academic engagements, he also led the cricket team of IIT Guwahati at the ‘All-India Inter-IIT Sports Meet’ during 2017-19 and held several student representative posts at the institutional level throughout his college years.

Prateek Kumar

Mr. Prateek Kumar is a Ph.D. Candidate at School of Basic Science, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, Himachal Pradesh. He works on different systems of viral proteins to study their folding/unfolding behaviour, disordered property, protein-protein interaction, and structure-based inhibitor designing. His research is based on understanding the protein dynamics in different environments, modulation upon interaction with lipids, and identification of inhibitors against specified targets using in-silico as well as in-vitro approaches. He has published his research works in reputed and peer-reviewed international journals.

Mr. Kumar earned an M.Sc. in Bioinformatics from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He did his B.Sc. in Zoology from University of Delhi, New Delhi. In 2018, he worked as an intern for two months in his current home institute and worked on structure-based drug discovery on viral (Zika virus, Chikungunya virus) proteins. Since then, he has developed his interest in structure biology and drug designing.

During the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, he will investigate the least explored area of capsid protein and RNA interaction of Zika Virus. He will also perform experiments to identify novel druggable molecules.

Mr. Kumar has great interest in computers and likes to learn and implement newly developed technologies. Additionally, he is fond of cooking vegetarian food.

Chandrika Konwar

Ms. Chandrika Konwar is a Ph.D. scholar at the Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Center for Biomedical Research (ACBR), University of Delhi, Delhi. Her Ph.D. project explores the impact of gene regulation on cell death and aging which includes extensive experimentation with Caenorhabditis elegans (a nematode worm), molecular biology, microscopy and proteomics in parallel with big data and systems biology.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Konwar is studying the role of SIN3 in cancer by using C. elegans as the model system. This is expected to add new knowledge on cancer development and diagnosis and will help create the prospect of using the nematode as a disease model to elucidate the cellular and molecular markers underpinning tumorigenesis.

Prior to her Ph.D., she completed her B.Sc. (Biochemistry) and M.Sc. (Biomedical Science) from the University of Delhi. She has worked on several research projects including but not limited to finding new drug targets and natural remedies for infectious diseases like gonorrhoea and tuberculosis. She has also done some exciting interdisciplinary research on the social connotations of health and well-being within Indian sub-populations. Most of her findings have been published in reputed peer-reviewed journals and presented in conferences.

Ms. Konwar is a firm believer in open science and interdisciplinary research, and a strong proponent of science communication, public policy and sustainability. Apart from research, she devotes her time towards developing new skills and writing creative articles for different media as well as volunteering for social causes.

Simardeep Kaur

Ms. Simardeep Kaur is a doctoral candidate in the Division of Biochemistry, ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi. Her doctoral thesis focuses on deciphering the microRNA related modulations in contrasting rice genotypes under drought stress. Global climate change and associated adverse effects such as drought greatly influence plant growth and development thus, affecting crop yield, quality and agricultural sustainability as well.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow she will be working with bioinformatics experts to further improve her understanding of bioinformatic tools and software for comprehensive analysis of the data generated from the molecular biology related work (mainly drought related) from wet-lab experiments. She will learn to handle large data sets like those for transcriptome, lncRNAs, miRNAs, validation techniques and their analysis so that she can integrate molecular biology with bioinformatics to develop drought tolerant agricultural crops. Therefore, work carried out during the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowship will substantiate and help speed the progression of ongoing research projects towards developing a climate-smart cultivar for sustainable food production in the near future.

She went to Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), Ludhiana for her graduation in Biochemistry in 2017 and then attended the graduate school at PAU for her M.Sc. in Biochemistry in 2019. She worked on the Biochemical basis of leaf blight resistance in barley and published her results in a reputed journal. During her master’s, she received a gold medal for excellence in chemistry/biochemistry, a PAU merit Fellowship, the Pyara Singh Parmar award, and also represented PAU at the Indian Students Parliament held in Pune, Maharashtra. She is a recipient of the JRF and SRF from the CSIR in her Ph.D. and also cleared other national level examinations like GATE (Life Sciences), ICAR-NET, ARS-prelims, JNUEE etc.

When she is not working in her lab, Simardeep spends most of her time reading novels, cooking food for family, and exploring new places. A travel enthusiast and hodophile, she feeds her addiction by visiting as many places with her favourite Agronomist as she can.

Balasubramanian Geetha

Ms. Balasubramanian Geetha is a Ph.D. candidate and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. She has completed her graduate and postgraduate studies in English Literature from Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi, and Jamia Millia Islamia, respectively. She has received the GV Subramanyam Award and Nelabhatla Memorial Prize for her academic performance in B.A. (Hons.) English. She is also a gold medallist for her highest academic standing in M.A. English.

Geetha’s doctoral dissertation specifically focuses on the emergence of the hero-star Vijay Sethupathi (VJS) to examine the shifts in the cinematic representations of the hero figure in contemporary Tamil cinema. As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, she intends to formulate an alternative framework of stardom to study the figural possibilities of VJS at the intersection of changes in narrative techniques, aesthetic constitution, and digital technologies. Through the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, she plans to engage with this research dimension by gaining infrastructural access to South Asian libraries and archives, audio-visual material, and interacting with a wider intellectual community for expanding her disciplinary knowledge in the field of Cinema Studies.

Geetha’s research interests include Literary Studies, Film and Cultural Studies, Star Studies, and South Asian Popular Culture. She has presented papers at various academic forums such as American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), The Annual Conference on South Asia, and UGC-sponsored national conferences. Her forthcoming book chapter on the anti-caste politics of the Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal (2018) will be published in the anthology titled The Routledge Companion to Caste and Cinema in India (2022).

As a performance poet, Geetha has performed her writing pieces at multiple creative platforms like Poems India, Toronto International Festival of Authors, and Airplane Poetry Movement. She is also the winner of the Delhi Poetry Festival 2015. Further, she has been a part of the theatre group ‘Expressions’ in Jamia Millia Islamia and participated in street plays and proscenium stage performances at the National School of Drama and The Shakespeare Society of India. Finally, her poems have been published in the feminist anthology entitled The Kali Project: Invoking the Goddess Within (2021) and Pixie Dust and All Things Magical (2022).