Archives: Meet Our India Fulbrighters

Sheetal Mary Arockiamani

Ms. Sheetal Mary Arockiamani is a higher education professional based in Chennai, with extensive experience across diverse facets of the education sector. Over the past eight years, her work has encompassed pre-service teacher education, language and literacy program implementation for primary school students, and academic program management.

Sheetal has played a pivotal role in building two emerging higher education institutions in Tamil Nadu and has contributed significantly to shaping their academic journeys. As a founding team member at Sai University, Sheetal played a crucial role in establishing the Admissions Office and the Academics Office. At Vinayaka Mission’s Law School, she managed the Academics Office and facilitated a communication skills lab for students. Sheetal earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Anna University and completed the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University.

As a recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Fellowship, Sheetal is exploring the factors that drive student success in higher education. She is committed to fostering inclusive educational environments and creating impactful learning experiences that empower students to achieve their full potential.

Sampada Mehta

Ms. Sampada Mehta is a career civil servant with the Indian Administrative Service. She has worked in challenging geographical areas including the insurgency-affected district of Gadchiroli in Maharashtra. She has delivered upon diverse public service objectives which included managing centralized procurement of medicines and medical equipment for public health institutions and promoting integrated development of indigenous communities.

Sampada has led the World Bank-funded Maharashtra Agricultural Competitiveness Project and focused on promoting farmer producer companies. In her current assignment as Private Secretary to the President of India, she plays an important role in enhancing the interaction and engagement of the common man with the highest office of the Republic of India.

Sampada is a chartered accountant by training. Prior to joining the civil services, she rendered consultancy services in accounting, auditing, and taxation to various entities.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Sampada is pursuing a Master in Public Administration degree with the sub-specialty of public financial management. She hopes to gain advanced insights into efficient resource mobilization and optimum resource utilization. She looks forward to contributing to making fiscal policies that promote growth with equity and sustainability. As a cultural ambassador from India, Sampada is keen on sharing the Indic knowledge of yoga and meditation with her cohort and making friends with students from diverse backgrounds.

Renu Raj

Dr. Renu Raj is a medical doctor and Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, currently serving as Director of the Scheduled Tribes Development Department, Government of Kerala. She has held key roles, including District Collector of Wayanad, Ernakulam, and Alappuzha, as well as Director of Kerala’s Urban Development Department. Her work spans governance, development, and public health, with a focus on welfare programs for over 3,300 tribal settlements, implementing the Aspirational Districts Program, urban infrastructure projects under AMRUT, and managing COVID-19 responses effectively.

Dr. Raj earned her MBBS degree from Government Medical College, Kottayam, and an MA in Public Management from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has also completed leadership and governance training at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, which honed her administrative capabilities.

Recognized for her outstanding contributions to governance, Dr. Raj has received several honors, including a Good Service Entry from NITI Aayog and the GFiles Governance Award. She was ranked second in the 2015 UPSC Civil Services Examination and featured in India Today’s prestigious List of Doers and Makers, highlighting her impactful career.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Dr. Raj is pursuing a Master’s in Public Health. She seeks to combine her expertise in public administration and medicine to strengthen global healthcare systems, bridge public health and policy gaps, and improve healthcare access worldwide.

Nivedhitha Kalyanaraman

Nivedhitha is a Lawyer specializing in Constitutional Law. She graduated with a BA LLB from Alliance University, Bangalore in 2014, where she secured the gold medal for academic excellence.

She served as a Law Clerk and Research Associate to Dr. Justice Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud, the former Chief Justice of India, for nearly four years. She worked on crucial constitutional issues. She assisted the Chief Justice on the cases relating to the challenge to Electoral Bonds, the sub-classification within the Scheduled Castes, the right to marriage of queer persons, the special status of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, the minority status of Aligarh Muslim University, the challenge to the abrogation of special status to Jammu and Kashmir, and the ban on Media One, among others. During her clerkship tenure, she also worked on drafting the Handbook on Combating Gender Stereotypes and the Sensitization Module for the Judiciary on LGBTQIA+, both published by the Supreme Court of India. She is currently working on a project on electoral democracy at the Vidhi Center for Legal Policy, New Delhi.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Nivedhitha is studying constitutional law and philosophy with a focus on the law of democracy. She wishes to identify the social, political, and legal structures that dilute electoral democracy during her study in the United States. After returning to India, Nivedhitha plans to work towards strengthening the democratic process through impactful legal and policy interventions.

Midhun Vijayan

Hailing from Kerala, Mr. Midhun Vijayan has been working for the last four years as a video journalist and producer at Down To Earth magazine in New Delhi. Apart from producing reports on science, technology, agriculture, health and public policy, he has travelled across India to make documentaries on climate change adaptation and mitigation from the perspective of rural communities.

Midhun has been honored with a Special Jury Mention at the India International Science Film Festival for a report that explored the solid waste management practices of India’s megacities. He was part of the team that received the Ramnath Goenka Award for Broadcast Journalism in the Environment and Science category, one of the highest journalism honors in the country.

Midhun has more than five years of experience producing documentaries, explainers and ground reports for India’s traditional media, new media as well as not-for-profit organizations. Based on his extensive experience, he was chosen to be a part of PSBT’s prestigious Doc_Commune cohort in 2024-25. He started his video production career with The Better India, Bangalore after graduating from the Mass Communication Research Department of Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, with a university rank and gold medal.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Midhun is working to expand his craft to explore complex concepts of empathy, duty, morality and social justice in the backdrop of contemporary news topics. In the long run, he aims to contribute to the new wave of documentary culture in India through mentorship programs for India’s youth.

Anviti Chaturvedi

Ms. Anviti Chaturvedi is an officer of the Indian Foreign Service, with over 10 years of work experience in law, policy and diplomacy. Currently, she is posted as Political & Media Officer in the Embassy of India, Tokyo.

Anviti graduated with a BA LLB from the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. Thereafter, she worked as a senior analyst with PRS Legislative Research, New Delhi, supporting Members of Parliament with research across a range of sectors including external affairs, defense and home affairs.

As part of her diplomatic duties, Anviti was deployed as Liaison Officer at the G7 Summit, Hiroshima, and the G20 Summit, New Delhi, in 2023. She also had the opportunity to be a part of the Indian delegation in various high-level bilateral (India-Japan) and Quad (Australia-India-Japan-US) dialogues in Tokyo. Concurrently, with her role as Political and Media Officer, she served as the officer-in-charge of bilateral relations with the Republic of the Marshall Islands. While posted in Tokyo, Anviti also studied the Japanese language, and attained a high-level of proficiency.

Under the Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Fellowship, Anviti is pursuing an LLM focusing on the intersection of law of the sea, technology regulation, and national security law. After completing the course, she intends to work in areas relating to international law and India’s policy initiatives in the Indo-Pacific region, while serving with the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India.

Mohammed Roshan Cheerakolil Konath

Dr. Mohammed Roshan C.K. completed his Ph.D. from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai in 2021. He completed his master’s and bachelor’s in sociology from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and the University of Calicut, Malappuram, Kerala respectively. In his Ph.D. dissertation, he explored the techniques of cultivating affective bonding with the Prophet Muhammed and the devotional world these bonds create among the Mappila Muslims of Kerala, South India.

Dr. Roshan has published in renowned academic and non-academic journals. He has presented at numerous national and international conferences. His area of interest revolves around the sociology of religion, technology, globalization and local cultures, affect studies, intellectual history of Islam, anthropology of Islam, and Islam and Muslims in South Asia.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship, Dr. Roshan is looking at a recent phenomenon among Mappila Muslims of South India whereby they look toward North American Muslim scholars to form an opinion on Islamic matters and shape their everyday life. The foundational assumption in this study is that this new tendency needs to be located in the ongoing surge of neo-traditional Islam in different parts of the world. The study compares neo-traditional Islam’s characters, structures, mode of knowledge production, global networking, and authorities in North America and South India, and analyzes the shared characteristics and ruptures between traditional Islam in both contexts. Dr. Roshan’s study enquires how these complex trans-local realities, mediated through the means and structure of globalization, call to reimagine the conventional boundaries between Islam and the West.

Ruokuonuo Rose Yhome

Dr. Ruokuonuo Rose Yhome obtained her B.A. degree from St. Joseph’s College, University of Nagaland in 2012, and her master’s degree from the Department of Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archaeology, Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute, Pune in 2014. She then received her Ph.D. in 2021 under the supervision of Dr. Veena Mushrif Tripathy at Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute, Pune. Her doctoral research focused on microwear analysis of human dentition recovered from the Jotsoma, Leshemi, Ranyak Khen, and Rikhelüwong sites in Nagaland.

At Highland Institute, an independent research center located in Nagaland, Dr. Yhome worked as Programme Manager and supervised field teams. During such efforts, she collaborated with international research teams from the U.K., including the Nuffield Centre for International Health and Development and the University of Leeds, as well as with national teams from India, including Oxford Policy Management and the World Bank.

Although diet is broadly accepted as a critical parameter for understanding human behavior and ecological adaptation, and dental microwear analysis (DMA) is emerging as a preferred method by which bioarcheologists and paleontologists can reconstruct the diets of past peoples, the latter remains largely unused at India’s most important archaeological sites. During her Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship, Dr. Yhome aims to address this significant lacuna by exploring the dietary behaviors of Chalcolithic, including Harappan and Iron Age populations, through an analysis of dental remains recovered from Harrapan, Chalcolithic, and Megalithic sites in India.

Krupa Rajangam

Dr. Krupa Rajangam is a humanities-based heritage scholar and conservation practitioner. In her research, she draws on anthropology and social geography to interpret nature-culture conservation practices, particularly the construction of socio-cultural place identities, urban-rural geographies, and tourism imaginaries. Her work is community-engaged, with a focus on public dissemination of research.

Dr. Rajangam earned her bachelor’s in architecture in 1999 from the RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru and her master’s in conservation studies in 2005 from the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies, University of York, UK. In 2020, she completed her doctorate in conservation studies at the National Institute of Advanced Studies and Manipal Academy of Higher Education.

Dr. Rajangam is the Founder-Director of a collective called “Saythu… Linking People and Heritage” and an editorial board member of the Taylor & Francis journal, Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites (CMAS). She runs an immersive field school that is driven by and teaches critical theory, experiential field-based education, and interdisciplinary methods of learning.

Through her Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Rajangam is working to contribute to global debates on archaeological and heritage place-making, social geography, and social violence as outcomes of UNESCO World Heritage inscription, boundary demarcation, and management. The need for such studies is pressing urban-centric development of historic landscapes, contrary to the intent of practice and policy, is deepening social marginalization.

Poulami Nandi

Dr. Poulami Nandi is a postdoctoral fellow at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat since March 2022. She received her Ph.D. in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) in April 2022. She earned her master’s in physics from IITK and joined the research group of Prof. Arjun Bagchi in 2017 to pursue her Ph.D. Her doctoral thesis “Carrollian Conformal Symmetry and Holography” focuses on Carrollian conformal and BMS field theories, and their relations with the holographic principle for asymptotically flat spacetimes.

During her Ph.D., Dr. Nandi was awarded two international fellowships: the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Fellowship 2019-2020 for nine months to visit the University of California, Davis and the Overseas Visiting Doctoral Fellowship 2018-2019 for 12 months by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Government of India. She was also affiliated with the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria for six months from August 2019 before moving to California in 2020. She was awarded International Travel Support (ITS) by SERB in 2022 to present her work at the prestigious annual conference “Strings” in Vienna. She also received the INSPIRE scholarship from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India during her undergraduate studies. She has co-authored several publications in international high-impact journals and presented her works through multiple seminars and posters in India and Europe.

The holographic principle is one of our best hopes to understand quantum gravity. One of its most prominent examples is the AdS/CFT correspondence, which is also deeply connected to diverse branches of physics, such as condensed matter, quantum information, and optics. During her Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship, Dr. Nandi is investigating the interface of quantum theory of gravity and theory of quantum computation. She is working to understand aspects of quantum information theory for non-Lorentzian field theories, in the context of flat-space holography, and also the dynamics of quantum systems.