Indian Fellows 2026-2027 Archives - Page 4 of 10

Aayushi Bengani

Ms. Aayushi Bengani is doing a PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of Delhi. Her doctoral research explores urban land management by Indian Railways using ethnographic and archival methods. It builds on her sustained engagement with urban informality through her study and work experiences in Mumbai. These consist of her MA in the School of Media and Cultural Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, her internship with the daily The Indian Express, and her work with development organizations Azim Premji Foundation and YUVA.

A Senior Research Fellow at Delhi School of Economics, Aayushi has consistently presented her research on “vacant” railway lands in Mumbai at eminent urban workshops and conferences globally. These include Urban Theories Across Borders’s Workshop on Researching the Ordinary City, Bangkok and Urban Affairs Association’s International Conference on Urban Affairs, New York, for which she received a fully-funded international travel grant from Indian Council of Social Science Research.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow, Aayushi is undertaking a comparative study of the railways in the U.S. to understand the current framework of railway land monetization in India. She is analyzing how lands along the railroads in New York City are currently managed and have historically been monetized. Her research aims to provide insights into the changing role of the state with regard to public lands, contributing to the scholarship on land transformation and state-making. Her interest in learning through storytelling drives her in research and otherwise.

Keerthi Jalli

Ms. Keerthi Jalli is a 2013-batch Indian Administrative Service officer of the Assam-Meghalaya cadre. Over the past 13 years, she has held multiple leadership positions in Assam, working on public health, nutrition, and women’s empowerment. She currently serves as Commissioner, Panchayat and Rural Development, Assam, and Mission Director, Swachh Bharat Mission-Grameen.

As District Commissioner, Keerthi focused on improving maternal and child health, combating anemia and malnutrition, strengthening citizen participation, and enhancing service delivery in geographically challenging and socio-economically vulnerable regions. She played a key role in managing flood response and COVID-19 relief efforts. Her work has been recognized with the Chief Minister’s Karmashree Award for Excellence in Public Administration.

In her current role, Keerthi oversees rural development and sanitation programs. She is leading efforts to strengthen local self-governance institutions, promote sustainable sanitation, enhancing livelihoods, and building climate-resilient communities through decentralized development.

Keerthi holds a B.Tech. in computer science and engineering. She has extensive experience in designing and implementing large-scale public programs. As a Humphrey Fellow, she is focusing on technology policy and management. She aims to study how emerging technologies, data-driven governance, and digital public infrastructure can strengthen public service delivery and improve development outcomes, particularly for underserved communities.

Shashank Anand

Mr. Shashank Anand is a career law enforcement officer. He joined the Indian Police Service in 2006 and was awarded the Prime Minister’s Baton and Home Ministry’s Revolver for being the best officer-trainee at the National Police Academy, Hyderabad. In his parent cadre Haryana, he served as police chief of five districts and gained rich experience in public order management, counterterrorism operations and criminal investigations.

Shashank is credited with pioneering electronic filing of chargesheets, constituting community liaison groups for alternative dispute resolution and reducing road accidents as traffic police chief of Chandigarh. He is now Inspector General in the Border Security Force, the world’s largest border-guarding force.

An engineer by education, Shashank has a MTech in telecommunications technology and management from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and holds LL.B. from Punjab University, Chandigarh. He is a Chevening Gurukul Fellow. As a Humphrey Fellow, Shashank is studying international best practices in border management, particularly those related to human trafficking and contraband smuggling. He seeks to contribute to drafting effective, humane and technologically-enabled public policies in this field. On the personal front, Shashank is a bibliophile and an avid player of tennis and golf.

Rinni Singh

Dr. Rinni Singh is a Scientific Officer at Uttar Pradesh Council of Agricultural Research, Lucknow, with over a decade of experience spanning research, policy integration, and institutional management. She plays a pivotal role in advancing sustainable agriculture through the coordination of high-impact initiatives, including the Uttar Pradesh Millet Revival Program and international R&D collaborations with organizations such as ICRISAT, Hyderabad.

As Nodal Officer for UPCAR-SEED Incubation Centre, Dr. Singh leads the development of a vibrant agri-startup ecosystem in the state. She has spearheaded over 200 outreach-capacity-building events and serves as a core mentor to agri-tech startups and incubator communities. Her expertise in innovation management is underpinned by advanced training from SINE IIT Bombay, Venture Center Pune, and Nexus Startup Hub at American Center, New Delhi. Her insights on strengthening incubation models were featured in U.S. Embassy’s SPAN Magazine, reflecting her growing influence in this space.

Dr. Singh additionally serves as Member Secretary on Board of Directors of the ANDUAT Incubation Centre, Ayodhya, and contributes to a diverse portfolio of projects ranging from skill development under PMKVY 4.0 to climate-resilient crop variety research.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Singh is aiming to develop a comparative biotech incubation framework that bridges India’s frugal, mission-driven innovation with United States’ advanced university-led institutional innovation ecosystems. She aims to co-design a leadership curriculum and a bilateral incubation toolkit to equip the next generation of agri-entrepreneurs with skills and networks needed to drive transformative change.

Richa Patanjali Mishra

Dr Richa Patanjali Mishra is the Founding Chair and Head, Humanities and Social Sciences at the Institute of Technology, Nirma University. She leads an interdisciplinary department serving engineering students across all programs with the firm belief that the humanities are not optional in STEM institutions but essential to shaping reflective, ethical, and socially responsible engineers. A scholar of the teaching-learning process and digital humanities, Dr. Mishra explores how human-centered STEM education can cultivate critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and interdisciplinary learning within engineering education. Her research develops diagnostic instruments, reflective learning frameworks, and curricular models that examine how these capacities can be systematically embedded and assessed within engineering education.

Dr. Mishra is the John Sayers Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, and has trained at Oxford, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University. As a Shastri Indo-Canadian Visiting Scholar, she researched higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) in engineering classrooms, work that has anchored her sustained scholarship on critical thinking pedagogy. A prolific published author, she conceptualized India’s first digital humanities minor course for engineering students, authored the book Introduction to Critical Thinking, and is Principal Investigator of projects funded by agencies including ICSSR.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Mishra is co-designing and validating interdisciplinary STEM-humanities curricular frameworks within the computer science capstone sequence. Upon her return, she will establish a STEM-Humanities Curriculum Innovation Lab and launch a MOOC, Technology, Ethics, and Society, translating evidence-based models for human-centered engineering education aligned with India’s NEP 2020 and U.S. priorities for accountable science.

Rekha Biswal

Dr. Rekha Biswal is Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER), Bhubaneswar. Her research focuses on representation theory, algebraic combinatorics, and Lie theory, with particular emphasis on Kac-Moody algebras, crystal bases, and quantum groups. Her work explores the combinatorial and algebraic structures underlying representations of infinite-dimensional Lie algebras, tensor product decompositions, and symmetric functions. Through the development of new crystal-theoretic and combinatorial techniques, she has contributed to several fundamental problems in representation theory and its connections with algebraic combinatorics.

Dr. Biswal received her integrated PhD in Mathematics from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. She subsequently held postdoctoral positions at Université Laval, the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, and the University of Edinburgh before joining NISER in 2022. She has also served as Visiting Professor and Foreign Researcher at the Institut Camille Jordan, University of Jean Monnet, France. Her achievements have been recognized through several awards and fellowships, including the Odisha Young Scientist Award.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Biswal is focusing on the Schur positivity conjecture, a long-standing open problem in algebraic combinatorics. In collaboration with Professor Pavlo Pylyavskyy at the University of Minnesota, she will develop new combinatorial and crystal-theoretic methods to study tensor product multiplicities and advance understanding of symmetric functions and representation theory.

Nagarajan Ganapathy

Dr. Nagarajan Ganapathy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH), India, where he heads the Medical Informatics and Digital Health Laboratory. He earned his PhD in Biomedical Engineering in 2019 at IIT Madras, India, and was a DAAD fellow at TU Braunschweig, Germany, followed by postdoctoral training at the Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics (PLRI), TU Braunschweig and Hannover Medical School, Germany. He continues to serve as a Visiting Scientist at PLRI. His research expertise spans affective computing, artificial intelligence, multimodal analysis, wearables and IoMTs, mental well-being, behavioural informatics, unobtrusive sensing, and edge analytics — with a focus on intelligent, non-invasive systems for continuous mental health monitoring and emotion recognition. He is a recipient of the DAAD Research Fellowship and DAAD Research Ambassador Award and serves as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Ganapathy is collaborating with Professor Rosalind Picard at the MIT Media Lab. He is combining his expertise in multimodal physiological AI with Professor Picard’s pioneering work in affective computing and mental health sensing to develop transformative non-invasive mental health monitoring systems and strengthen the India-United States research partnership.

Lakshmi Priya Daniel

Dr. Lakshmi Priya Daniel joined the Department of Fine Arts, Stella Maris College, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India in 1996 and has served as Director of SMCHRD, IQAC Coordinator, and Dean of Student Affairs. She earned her PhD in 2013 from the University of Madras with a focus on gender and Indian art. A 2018-2019 UBCHEA Fellow, she completed the ‘Leadership Development Program’ at Harvard Graduate School of Education and worked at the University of Melbourne. She is a recognized PhD guide of the University of Madras, has won best presentation awards, published widely, and served as guest faculty at institutions such as NIFT, IIT-Madras, and the Government College of Fine Arts, Chennai. Also, a practicing artist and curator, she has exhibited in group shows, including the 2021 USIEF–Ojas Art Gallery international exhibition ‘Reciprocation: American Fulbright Artists & India Connections’ in New Delhi.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Daniel is teaching and engaging students, artists, and educators in building cross-cultural connections on and off campus. Her teaching centers on research-based art practice, guiding students to create meaningful, informed eco-artworks. She will also devote her time to archival work, interviews, and surveys on ephemeral art by Black and women artists. Her research explores unseen artisanal practices, dying crafts, and sustainable materials, fostering dialogue on cultural preservation and ecological approaches to contemporary art-making.

Vamsee Krishna Voora

Dr. Vamsee Krishna Voora is an Associate Professor at Department of Chemical Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Before beginning his independent career, he did his PhD from University of Pittsburgh followed by a postdoctoral fellowship from the University of California, Irvine.

Dr. Voora’s doctoral work led to the identification of new electronic states of negatively charged molecular systems, which are known as nonvalence correlation-bound states. His current research interests include developing efficient computational tools and theoretical models for understanding core-level spectroscopy, weak intermolecular interactions and surface chemistry. The methods developed by his group have become a part of widely used quantum chemistry software suites.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Voora will develop computational frameworks to provide femtosecond-scale electronic structure information of active sites, in chemical reactions, under realistic reaction conditions. This framework will offer dynamic insights into reaction mechanisms, complementing experimental operando studies and enhancing the interpretation of industrial important catalytic reactions.