India Fellows Years: Indian Fellows 2022-2023

Anjana Thampi

Dr. Anjana Thampi is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Jindal Global Law School, O. P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana. She received her BA (Hons.) from the University of Delhi in 2009, and MA from the University of Hyderabad in 2011. She completed her MPhil in 2014 and PhD in 2019 from the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, under the supervision of Prof. Jayati Ghosh. Her doctoral thesis explored the impact of two food provisioning programmes on child nutrition and inequality in India. She was awarded the UGC Junior Research Fellowship in 2013.

Her areas of research include food security and nutrition, climate and sustainability, inequality, gender, and labour. She has published journal articles and book chapters and contributes opinion pieces on contemporary issues. She has also presented her work at national and international workshops and conferences.

Dr. Thampi’s postdoctoral project, supported by the Fulbright-Kalam fellowship, would assess the potential of a strengthened employment guarantee programme to address the climate and livelihoods crises in India. The study would estimate the green jobs created through a universal employment guarantee in India, its budgetary requirement, and suggest ways to finance it. The global Green New Deal, green job guarantee proposals in the United States, and international experiences of job guarantee would be compared with the experiences of the rural job guarantee in India. This project would have policy implications for India and the global project to address the climate crisis.

Gopal Murali

Dr. Gopal Murali’s research interest spans many areas in ecology and evolution pertaining to biological diversity at various scales and organizations. He obtained his PhD in 2020 from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. His doctoral research focused on understanding the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms underlying defensive animal colourations and has published several research articles in reputed, peer-reviewed international journals. After his PhD, Dr. Murali was awarded the PBC postdoctoral fellowship for outstanding Chinese and Indian postdoctoral fellows by the Council for Higher Education, Israel (2020). His current work at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, applies macroecological and macroevolutionary perspectives to characterize processes that underlie various broad-scale biodiversity patterns, and to predict how biodiversity will shift in response to recent environmental change.

Climate change poses a major threat to biodiversity, and there is an urgent need to forecast the effects of climate change on species persistence to inform conservation. During his Fulbright-Nehru postdoctoral research fellowship, in collaboration with Prof. John J. Wiens, Dr. Murali aims to utilize data from recent species’ responses to climate change to incorporate the adaptive capacity of species in climate change vulnerability assessments.

Arpita Dalal

Dr. Arpita Dalal obtained her B.Sc degree from Birjhora Mahavidyalaya, Gauhati University, in 2010 and her master’s degree from the Department of Ecology and Environmental Science, Assam University, in 2012. She then received her PhD in 2020 under the supervision of Prof. Susmita Gupta at Assam University-. Her research work focuses on biomonitoring and ecology of freshwater ecosystems using aquatic insects and use of predatory macroinvertebrates (such as aquatic insects and crustaceans) as biocontrol agents of mosquito populations. Dr. Dalal has published several research articles in reputable international and national journals. She was awarded the DST-INSPIRE Fellowship (2013) and has qualified in the CBSE-UGC NET examination (2014). Her other scientific recognitions include JSPS HOPE Fellow awarded at 8th HOPE Meeting with Nobel Laureates, Japan (2016); selection for Newton-Bhabha PhD placement programme, hosted by Queen’s University, UK for six months, sponsored by British Council, UK and DBT, India (2016). She was also selected from India to participate in the BRICS Young Scientist Forum Conclave, Russia (2020).

Aedes aegypti mosquito is a carrier of deadly diseases worldwide include dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya. Recently, they invaded the Great Plains of USA, expanding their range. Factors of their invasion and expansion must be identified to prevent further expansion. To address this issue in her postdoctoral stint supported by the Fulbright-Kalam fellowship, Dr. Dalal is designing feeding experiments under different climatic and abiotic factors coupled with field works to identify the reasons behind the A. aegypti invasion and sustenance in a new area.

Manashita Borah

Dr. Manashita Borah, is as an Assistant Professor (Senior Grade) in the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE), Tezpur University, Assam, India since 2016. She obtained her PhD from Department of EE, NIT Silchar. Dr Borah is the recipient of the Young Scientist Award, conferred by DST, Government of Assam in the State Awards Ceremony for Scientific Excellence in 2019, the Young Engineer’s Award by Senior Engineers Forum, Institution of Engineers in 2018 and two IEEE best paper awards. Additionally, she also received the Distinguished Anundoram Borooah Merit Award from the Government of Assam and Oil India Limited.

Dr Borah leads the Control System Design and Simulation Laboratory in the Department of EE at Tezpur University, where her research group is focusing on designing fractional-order controllers, IoT enabled renewable energy systems, among others.

Her Fulbright-Kalam project aims to address two open problems faced globally: shortcomings of existing energy infrastructure and climate sustainable energy storage by capitalizing on green energy sources. She will be working on designing a smart hybrid storage system to deliver an improved, sustainable, resilient, safe, and efficient green energy storage infrastructure. It will address the serious implications of climate change faced in her home state of Assam, such as heavy floods due to the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, soil erosion and landslides that cause power outage for several days.

Apart from being conferred with prestigious awards and having publications in reputed journals, she has been actively associated with various departmental, academic and co-curricular activities of the university, such as dance, drama, and yoga. She has been trained in the Indian classical dance forms of Bharatnatyam and Shattriya for twelve years.

Shreya Shrikant Katre

Shreya Katre is a PhD candidate at the Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, where she works with Dr. Archana M Nair and Dr. Ravi K. She graduated from Walchand College of Engineering Sangli, Maharashtra, with a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering and a Master’s degree in Earth System Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. Her current research focuses on the geological carbon sequestration in selected rock formations of India. The goal of her research is to estimate the carbon storage potential of Indian basins and to identify novel carbon storage pathways using various geophysical and geochemical techniques.

Throughout her career, Shreya has participated in many social activities, workshops, technical quizzes, and was rewarded on various occasions. She has also worked as a bridge designer on a Metro rail project while working at STUP consultants Pvt. Ltd. She has presented her research at many national and international conferences through travel grants and has published in peer-reviewed journal and book chapters. Apart from this, Shreya is a Marathi language writer and poet and takes a special interest in Indian classical music.

As a Fulbright-Kalam Climate Fellow, her primary objective is to contribute to the science of carbon mineralization in ultramafic and basaltic rocks which paves a path to its applications in carbon management technologies. She will study the kinetics of carbonation and enhanced carbonation techniques to provide insights to the geochemistry of CO2-water-rock interactions. The application of this technology extends to in-situ carbon dioxide storage and ex-situ carbon dioxide removal methods.

Amritha M. S.

Amritha M. S. is a research scholar at the Department of Botany, University of Calicut, Kerala, India. Her research is supported by CSIR in the form of a junior research fellowship, and her research is jointly supervised by Prof. (Dr.) Jos T. Puthur and Dr. Kishore Sridharan.

She is a proud alumna of St. Mary’s College, Thrissur, Kerala, India and St. Thomas College (Autonomous), Thrissur, Kerala, India, where she did her Bachelor’s degree and Master’s degree in Botany, respectively. For her doctoral research, she is studying the role of “Nanoscale graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) priming of rice (Oryza sativa L.) for enhancing abiotic stress tolerance”. She has publications in top-tier journals to her credit.

She is attempting to develop a cost-effective and farmer-friendly technique for protecting plants against various abiotic stresses using nanostructured priming agents, under the supervision of her guides. Apart from her research, Amritha enjoys teaching students and is an excellent mentor who has been successful in inspiring some of her students to pursue careers in science and research while working as Assistant Professor. Her hobby is to identify plants and learn about the flora of different places.

The Fulbright-Kalam Climate Fellowship will help her explore how nano-structural material priming agents such as g-C3N4 and their relatively useful forms can help plants cope with adverse environmental conditions, as well as the molecular mechanisms behind this plant tolerance. It also allows her to examine how the study results will benefit farmers

Ammoose Kunjanparampil Jayan

Ammoose K. Jayan is currently conducting her research under the DST-Inspire Junior Research Fellowship at the Department of Geology, Central University of Kerala, Kerala. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Geology and Water Management with first-rank from Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala. She is also a first-rank holder during her Master’s in Geology from Central University of Kerala, India. Her doctoral research mainly focuses on the paleoceanographic investigations of sediments from the Bay of Bengal (BoB). She studies the assemblages of planktonic foraminifera and its shells’ geochemical composition in order to understand the impact of climatic and environmental changes on modern and fossil organisms, particularly during the Holocene.

Ms. Jayan has published her research findings in the International journal Marine Micropaleontology and presented her work at several National and International conferences. In 2021, she was awarded with the TMS Grant-in-Aid, by The Micropaleontological Society, London. In the same year, she also participated in a scientific expedition to BoB Onboard Sagar Kanya Research Vessel, to collect gravity core samples for her research. During her Master’s, she was one of the recipients of the Indian Academy of Sciences’ Summer Research Fellowship, 2018, and had conducted research at the National Institute of Oceanography, Visakhapatnam.

As a Fulbright-Kalam Fellow, Ms. Jayan will work on the fate of the East India Coastal Current (EICC) during the Holocene and H1 event, correlating with excessively strong and weak phases of ISM variability. Another goal of this research is to test any offset in the elemental and isotopic composition of the morphotypes of Globigerinoides ruber, a mixed-layer planktonic foraminiferal species, from the BoB.

Manoj Hariharan

Manoj Hariharan’s love of science began with a trek in fall, with his father, when his eyes captured the changing color of leaves in the midst of sheets of rain that turned paths into bewitching rivulets. Pursuing a doctorate nurtures this fascination scientifically. It also brings a deeper glimpse into all the good nature can do, from uncovering our survival to understanding Earth’s processes that shape our world.

At the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, Hariharan covers biosphere-atmosphere interactions and intends to understand how climate, pollution, atmospheric and geographic sciences shape and are shaped by the terrestrial carbon cycle. He tries to picture them mainly with the “eye in the sky.” He is a graduate of the Department of Geography at the University of Madras, Chennai, and a Project Fellow at the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Dehradun. He loves stargazing in his downtime.

As a Fulbright-Kalam Climate Fellow, Hariharan anticipates spending time with climate models at a supercomputer cluster to understand the dynamic traits of carbon. He will focus on the sensibility of the terrestrial ecosystems to environmental change, by attributing the processes to observed changes in the carbon pools using an integrated data platform. He expects the outcomes to draw him closer to better quantifying the trajectory of terrestrial carbon pools. Besides, he plans to explore the starry nights of the Colorado mountain trails and eagerly awaits experiencing a snowy Christmas eve.

Venugopal Vuruputur

Dr. Venugopal Vuruputur is presently a faculty member in the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (CAOS), Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. He has an M.S. and Ph.D. from University of Minnesota and a B.Tech. from IIT Madras, all in Civil Engineering (with specialization in Hydrology). Since joining CAOS, Dr. Vuruputur and his students have focused on characterizing the multiscale space-time structure of tropical rainfall and its variability. More recently, he has also been exploring hydrology-oriented problems, including estimation and simulation of surface and subsurface storage and their variability in the Ganges-Brahmaputra River system, coupled with analyzing geochemical markers upstream of the river to better characterize and understand landslide-triggered flash floods. He was an Associate Editor of Water Resources Research during the period 2013-2017 and has been on the review editorial board of Frontiers in Atmospheric Sciences since 2015. He has also been a member of national and regional committees related to cloud seeding experiments in India, and water resources management.

During his stint as a Fulbright-Kalam fellow at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), in collaboration with Prof. Jin-Yi Yu of the Department of Earth Science, Dr. Vuruputur proposes to identify and robustly characterize pathways from the midlatitudes that can potentially modulate the sub seasonal variability of the Indian monsoon, especially in the early and late phases of the season.

Vikram Vishal

Dr. Vikram Vishal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences and an associate faculty in the Interdisciplinary Programme in Climate Studies, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, Mumbai. He leads the ‘Computational and Experimental Geomechanics’ group at IIT Bombay. Dr. Vishal worked at IIT Roorkee over 2013-16, during which he pursued the Fulbright-Nehru postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. Dr. Vishal also serves as the Convener of the DST-sponsored ‘National Centre of Excellence in Carbon Capture and Utilization’ at IIT Bombay. He is a recipient of two national awards and holds the young scientist recognition from all major science academies in India. He is currently a member of the Indian National Young Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Vishal’s research interests are in the domains of geomechanics, carbon capture and sequestration, enhanced petroleum recovery and unconventional hydrocarbon systems.

During his Fulbright-Kalam Climate Fellowship at MIT, he aims to develop an integrated risk assessment framework using experimentally validated simulations for CO2 storage in a mature oilfield in India. This research work will build on evaluating the storage readiness of specific fields in an onshore sedimentary basin. Detailed understanding of the barriers and their elimination will be key to successful deployment of carbon capture and storage in India, and advance their readiness levels.