Archives: Meet Our India Fulbrighters

Priyanka Jamwal

Dr. Priyanka Jamwal is currently working as a Fellow in the Centre for Environment and Development, ATREE, Bengaluru. She completed her B. Tech in Civil Engineering from NIT Hamirpur (1997–2001) and Masters in Environmental Engineering from Punjab Technical University, Chandigarh (2001-2003) with several distinctions and her doctoral degree in Environmental Engineering and Management from IIT Delhi (2003–2008). She broadly works in water resource management with a focus on water quality. Her work focuses on identifying contaminant sources in surface water bodies, modelling the fate and transport of contaminants in urban hydrological systems and assessing the risk to human health due to exposure to contaminants. Her empirical work has focused on quantifying microbial load from point and non-point sources in urbanising watersheds. Her work on the fate of trace metals and nutrients in urban hydrological systems has identified gaps in India’s water quality regulatory frameworks.

She has made significant contributions in the field of environmental pollution and human health risk assessment. Her work also focuses on understanding the groundwater sanitation nexus in the peri-urban spaces that lack piped water supply and centralised sanitation infrastructures. She applies interdisciplinary approaches to understand the factors that drive humans to interact with the environment in a certain way that impacts water resources. She is also interested in developing design principles for the deployment and scaling of Nature-based solutions (NBS) to address water pollution issues in urban and rural areas.

Tarun Jain

Dr. Tarun Jain is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. Previously, on the faculty at the Indian School of Business, he earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Virginia. His research focuses on understanding causes and consequences of human capital formation (for instance, with education and health), especially in the context of fast-growing developing countries. Gender is a topic of special research interest given that women face persistent barriers in economic advancement. His research has received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Growth Centre, and the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, published in peer-reviewed journals such as the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Public Economics, and featured in the New York Times, The Economist, the Times of India and Indian Express. He has written for media outlets such as the Economic Times, New Indian Express, Ideas for India, The Hindu and Mint, and been a speaker for TEDx IIM Ahmedabad.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship, Dr. Jain will analyze the impact of a gender attitude change curriculum taught in government schools on the life outcomes of young adults. Specifically, he will investigate the long-term impact of the program on gender-related attitudes during adulthood, female participants’ higher education, labor force participation and age of marriage, and marital choices made by married male participants, such as their wives’ education and employment status, and the gender division of domestic work.

Gowramma Ittara Poovaiah

Dr. Gowramma Poovaiah Ittira is a Professor at the Regional Institute of Education, Bhubaneswar, NCERT. She teaches right from the grass root level of Bachelors of Integrated Teacher Education Programme and extends her guidance to her doctoral candidates, thus covering a wide range of students from sectoral socio-lingual communities of varied age groups. She reaches up to approximately 900 to 1000 student teachers per year and mentors about a quarter of these students in their internships while they teach in varied, diverse locations among the four states in the eastern region of India. Her current role helps in facilitating and informing research, including culturally relevant practices from varied parts of India and disseminating the results to reach schools all around India.

Dr. Ittira’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to examine how and in what ways early literacy is affected by socio cultural practices. This project will document sociocultural practices adopted in early childhood and study their influence on literacy readiness. Furthermore, it will help inform literacy initiatives in local language and English, in India, highlighting what practices in early childhood education are beneficial. The project initiated from her home institute, Regional Institute of Education (RIE) Bhubaneswar, where she was exposed to the diverse languages of eastern India and its cultural diversity. She found similarities in practices in these practices with Kodava, her homeland. Thus, the research will directly contribute to early literacy development while incorporating the rich sociocultural practices. It will have a wide application in multilingual communities around India to foster literacy and early language acquisition while celebrating the vast cultural and linguistic diversity. Her current role will facilitate research in culturally relevant curriculum construction and practices along with possible forms of alternative education from varied parts of India and disseminating the results to reach schools all around India.

Amalendu Ghosh

Dr. Amalendu Ghosh is currently working as a Scientist in Advanced Centre for Plant Virology, ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi. He completed his postgraduate (2005-2007) and doctoral degree (2007-2010) in Agricultural Entomology from Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya, Kalyani, West Bengal with several distinctions. He has been a faculty member at IARI, New Delhi for the past seven years. His main research interest lies in understanding the relationships of insect vectors and plant viruses and developing novel molecules aiming to interrupt the inter-relationships and restrict the spread of diseases. Dr. Ghosh has demonstrated the inhibition of virus transmission by thrips and whitefly using double-stranded RNA and antisense oligos.

Dr. Ghosh has been the recipient of Endeavour Research Fellowship (Australian Government), four Young Scientist Awards, and nine competitive research grants.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship, he aims to carry out targeted gene editing and determine the effects on development, reproduction, embryogenesis, and vector competence of thrips. With his expertise in insect science combined with plant virology, he aims to learn and conduct research with a multidisciplinary approach at the Department of Plant Pathology, Washington State University, Pullman. He wishes to apply the CRISPR/Cas9 system in Thrips palmi (Thysanoptera, Thripidae) to induce sterility thereby reducing the transmission of tospoviruses. This approach will help to develop an eco-friendly tactic that is adaptable to changing climate to manage thrips as a pest and restrict the spread of tospoviruses.

Anu Unny

Dr. Anu Unny is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Kerala. She is also the Hon. Director of UGC-Nehru Studies Centre, University of Kerala. Before joining the University of Kerala, she worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Delhi. She has served as a Member of the Board of Studies in Kerala and Kannur Universities.

Dr. Unny completed her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from the School of International Studies (SIS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. Along with her teaching responsibilities, she acts as a research guide for the Ph.D. Programme in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Kerala. She is a recipient of the International Studies Association (ISA) grant to visit the US in 2017. She has many research papers to her credit in national and international journals. She has visited many countries, including the US, to present her research outcomes in conferences. She is an active participant in media discussions on international issues and a resource person for UGC Orientation and Refresher Programmes.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Dr. Unny will teach a course on the ‘Politics of Climate Change’ for students at the University of Washington. She will also engage in research at the University of Washington to understand the nuances of US domestic politics on climate change and to explore the challenges and possibilities in strengthening India-US climate cooperation. Apart from climate politics, Dr. Unny’s research interests lie in gender, human rights and Indian politics.

Sarita Sundar

Ms. Sarita Sundar’s practice and research spans heritage studies, visual culture, and design theory. She is the founder of Hanno, a heritage interpretation and design consultancy.

Ms. Sundar has a postgraduate degree in Visual Communications from the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad and an M.A. in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester, UK where she was awarded the 2016 Professor Eilean Hooper-Greenhill Academic Prize. She is a visiting faculty at various design institutes: including NID, Ahmedabad; and Srishti Manipal School of Design and Technology, Bangalore. Her research ranges from studies of vernacular typography to looking at the intangible and material culture of performance practices in the temples of Valuvanad, Kerala (for which she received a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts). Her present research focuses on the cultural and design history of seats in India and will culminate in a publication in 2022.

Ms. Sundar’s Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship takes forward her multi-disciplinary research and seeks to address the lacuna of critical discourse in the discipline of design in India. By mapping the transcultural exchange of aesthetics and ideologies between India and the United States, and situating the interconnected events and dialogues, Ms. Sundar’s project looks at how these historical milestones continue to motivate and influence contemporary design, and associated fields such as curatorial practice in both countries. Furthermore, it examines the pathways followed by modernism and counter-movements like postmodernism, and their interactions with indigenous epistemology in Indian aesthetics and thought. She is also co-teaching a course, ‘Visualizing India’, at the University of Vermont.

Shibayan Roy

Dr. Shibayan Roy is an Assistant Professor in the Materials Science Center of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Kharagpur, West Bengal since 2015.

Previously, Dr. Roy was a postdoctoral research associate at Materials Science and Technology Division in Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA from November 2013 to October 2015. He is the recipient of the R&D 100 award (2017) from R&D Magazine, USA as a part of the research group from ORNL.

Dr. Roy also worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Materials Science and Engineering (IWW), Department of Mechanical Engineering, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany from February 2012 to September 2013. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Materials Engineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore in November 2011. He also received the K.P. Abraham Gold Medal for Best Doctoral Thesis from IISc and the Student Innovative Thesis Award (Doctoral level) from the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) in 2012, in recognition of his doctoral thesis.

Through the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award (Research and Teaching) project, Dr. Roy aims for an in-depth characterization of coherency and orientation relationship as well as atomistic structure and remnant dislocations at α/β interfaces for different α-colony orientations after secondary TMP and additive manufacturing (AM) of two-phase Titanium alloys. His work also establishes an interrelation between these attributes of α/β interface and spheroidization response of different α-colony orientations in the course of secondary TMP and AM.

Ranjith Padinhateeri

Dr. Ranjith Padinhateeri is a professor in the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay). Dr. Padinhateeri’s lab focuses on theoretical studies to understand various biological phenomena using a variety of tools from physics, including statistical mechanics, polymer physics, and soft-matter theory. His specific areas of interest include nucleosome dynamics, chromatin assembly, DNA mechanics, and the self-assembly of proteins.

Dr. Padinhateeri completed his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, and the Institute Curie, Paris. He gained expertise in applying physics principles to understand biological systems. Dr. Padinhateeri joined the IIT Bombay faculty in 2009. He and his team developed computational models to investigate the kinetics of nucleosomes and the polymer organization of chromatin. Dr. Padinhateeri has received several awards, including the National Bioscience Award from the Department of Biotechnology India.

Dr. Padinhateeri’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to develop a model to understand chromatin organization —the organization of the genetic material— in space and time inside a cell nucleus, accounting for nucleosome dynamics. The predictions from computational studies of the model could help us to design gene regions that can have specific chromatin states. As a part of the fellowship, Dr. Padinhateeri also plans to teach a course on modeling biological processes covering stochastic processes, Monte Carlo simulations, and molecular dynamics simulations.

Rajesh Nachiappa Ganesh

Dr. Rajesh Nachiappa Ganesh is a Professor in the Department of Pathology at Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER), Puducherry. He works in the broad field of Surgical Pathology with special focus on Renal and transplant pathology, molecular pathology and image analysis. He has been actively working in the field of biomarker research in native and transplant renal diseases.

Professor Rajesh has 17 years of teaching and research experience in the field of surgical pathology after his doctoral degree and has been a faculty at JIPMER for twelve years. He had started the division of renal and transplant pathology services at JIPMER in 2010 and started post-doctoral fellowship in Nephro-pathology. He is actively involved in obtaining extra-mural funded research grants from various national and international agencies and has established a molecular research laboratory which has been expanded for diagnostic patient care with funding from Department of Health Research, India. He is also actively involved in proteomics applications and image analysis in the field of Pathology with several collaborative projects.

Professor Rajesh’s Fulbright project is intended on close interaction with senior consultants in Nephropathology at Houston Methodist Hospital, Texas, to study inter-observer reproducibility in diagnostic reporting of renal biopsies and validate the findings in Polyomavirus infections in transplant biopsies. The teaching component involves regular discussion of the biopsy and clinical findings with Nephrology residents and fellows at the center and is in synergy with the research objective to improve patient care outcomes.

Ramu Manivannan

Dr. Ramu Manivannan currently serves as Honorary Chairperson at Multiversity – Centre for Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Kurumbapalayam, Vellore, Tamil Nadu. He combines research and teaching experiments in education, development, and democracy with special interest on indigenous knowledge systems. He is a writer, public commentator and contributor to several Indian print and visual media outlets.

Dr. Manivannan served as a Professor and Head of the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Madras for sixteen years. He taught in Hindu College, Delhi University for over 18 years before joining the University of Madras. He was a fellow of the United Nations University, Tokyo, Japan. He has been working with refugees from Tibet, Burma and Sri Lanka for over three decades in the areas of peace, education and development. He has founded fifteen non-formal schools for the children from tribal areas, stone quarry areas and the weavers’ community before building an alternative school, Garden of Peace, for rural children based on holistic education, located in Kurumbapalayam in Vellore, Tamil Nadu.

Dr. Manivannan’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to undertake a comparative study on John Rawls, Amartya Sen and J. C. Kumarappa based on their works on justice and examine the implications of their ideas to the notions of democracy and development in India. Given the combination of teaching and research plan, he will also be teaching papers on democracy and development in India and South Asia, besides co-teaching a paper on the political economy of Brazil and India.