Meet Our India Fulbrighters Archive - Page 3 of 53

Sumeet Mhaskar

Prof. Sumeet Mhaskar is a Professor of Sociology at the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, O. P. Jindal Global University. He earned his doctorate in Sociology from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and holds MA and MPhil degrees in political science from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is a recipient of the prestigious research fellowship awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His distinguished career includes fellowships at renowned institutions such as Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Stanford University, Göttingen University and Kassel University.

Prof. Mhaskar’s research comprehensively explores the multifaceted vulnerabilities workers face at the lower end of India’s burgeoning economy. His scholarly contributions have been featured in peer-reviewed journals, edited books, magazines, policy reports, and working papers. Additionally, he shares his insights through opinion pieces, newspapers and online portals such as The Times of India, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, and The Hindu.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Prof. Mhaskar is planning to investigate technological innovations in the production process and their impact on occupational choices in the modern textile industry in Mumbai from the 1870s to 2009. This historical-sociological inquiry will examine how social structures, including gender, caste, and religion, interact with these processes. He employs a comprehensive multi-method approach that includes statistical analysis, archival research, and qualitative methods. Prof. Mhaskar will also explore similar processes in textile mills located in the USA.

Praveen Pathak

Dr. Praveen Pathak is a Scientific Officer at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, TIFR, Mumbai, a premier national institute dedicated to research and development in science and mathematics education. He has twenty years of experience in science education research, focusing on student misconceptions, teaching-learning methods, and designing hands-on activities and experiments from middle school to undergraduate physics. Dr. Pathak plays a key role in India’s Physics and Junior Science Olympiad programs, where he is involved in selecting, coaching, and mentoring the Indian team for the International Olympiads. He is also part of the NCERT textbook development team, contributing to creating science education resources for schools across India. He strongly believes in teaching through hands-on experiences and is passionate about science popularization, regularly contributing to scientific writing in Hindi to make science accessible to a wider audience.

Dr. Pathak’s recent work has focused on developing low-cost, smartphone-based experimental kits to improve science education, especially in schools with limited laboratory resources. By leveraging mobile sensors, his research aims to bring affordable hands-on learning experiences to students and teachers.

During his Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, Dr. Pathak is designing and evaluating a scalable smartphone-powered experimental kit, integrating it into school curricula to foster experiential learning. He will also conduct teacher workshops and collaborate with educators in the US to assess the impact of smartphone-based experiments on student engagement and learning outcomes.

Meenakshi Shukla

Dr. Meenakshi Shukla is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology at University of Allahabad, Prayagraj, India, with more than seven years of teaching and research experience. Her research interests involve exploring the relationship of emotions and emotional disorders with health. Her research delves into the intriguing phenomenon of cardiovascular emotional dampening, exploring how challenges in recognizing emotions relate to elevated blood pressure.

Dr. Shukla has completed her graduation, post-graduation, and PhD from Banaras Hindu University. She was awarded the Junior and Senior Research Fellowships by the University Grants Commission of India to pursue her PhD research. She has been the recipient of the Commonwealth Split-site (PhD) Scholarship in 2016-2017 by the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission (CSC) to carry out a part of her doctoral research work at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London, United Kingdom. She is a member of the CSC Alumni Advisory Panel.

Dr. Shukla’s Fulbright-Nehru project investigates the role of cardiovascular emotional dampening — a reduced ability to recognize emotions linked to elevated blood pressure — in shaping the cultural adaptation and health of first-generation Indian immigrants in the United States. It examines whether cardiovascular emotional dampening influences the choice of acculturation strategies (assimilation, integration, separation, or marginalization) among Indian immigrants and how these strategies impact their long-term cardiovascular health. The study also examines the “immigration paradox”, exploring why recent Indian immigrants often have better health than long-term residents despite greater stressors.

Nirmala Menon

Prof. Nirmala Menon is a Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), IIT Indore, and leads the Digital Humanities and Publishing Research Group. Prof Menon is the Chair of J. P. Narayan National Centre of Excellence in the Humanities at IIT Indore and is an affiliate Research Professor with the University of Oxford. She is the author of four books with the latest Practices of Digital Humanities in India: Learning by Doing (Routledge, 2024). She is also the co-editor of the first multilingual volume of e-literature published from India (2024). Prof. Menon has received various national and international grants and awards (MHRD, SPARC, UKEIRI, and Academia Europaea among others). She has also hosted Fulbright Scholars in her lab and along with her students, received international awards such as Charles Wallace Fellowship, Zubaan Sasakawa Publishing prize and ASEM-DUO fellowship.

During her Fulbright Research Fellowship, Prof. Menon will be working on a book project that explores the challenges and possibilities of developing a multilingual scholarly publishing ecosystem. The book examines the infrastructural, economic and intellectual challenges of developing a robust scholarly publishing set-up in the coming years. New technologies along with the rapid advancement of AI tools will shape the direction and policies of scholarly communication in the coming years and this book looks at issues of language and access within that discourse. Prof. Menon will also be working with Prof. Julia Flanders on the DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly Journal and contribute to and learn from its best practices.

Salom Gnana Thanga Vincent

Dr. Salom Gnana Thanga Vincent (Association of Commonwealth Universities Blue Charter Fellow: 2019-2020) is a Professor at the Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Kerala, Kerala, India. She is a graduate in agriculture, a postgraduate, and a doctorate in environmental sciences from Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India. Prof. Vincent worked as Head of the Department of Environmental Science for two terms and as the Director of the School of Earth System Sciences, University of Kerala. She is a member of the Scientific Strategic Board and adjunct faculty of the Centre of Excellence in Microbiome (CoEM), Government of Kerala, India. She is a member of the editorial board of Wetlands Ecology and Management and associate editor for Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science. Her broad research area is the benthic ecology of coastal ecosystems. Her work specifically focuses on the structural and functional diversity of microbes in the coastal environment of Kerala and relates the benthic diversity to environmental and anthropogenic impacts. At present, her research is also focused on the evaluation of environmental factors that influence the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance and the distribution of microplastics.

During her project for the Fulbright Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship, Prof. Vincent aims to explore the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs) and antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) in microplastics of sewage. The work will contribute to the understanding of how microplastics act as a ‘Trojan horse’ in the environmental spread of ARB and ARGs.

Kumar Biradha

Professor Kumar Biradha is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. His research focuses on designing multifunctional supramolecular materials using innovative crystal engineering strategies. Specifically, his work explores cocrystals, gels, organic polymers, coordination polymers, metal-organic frameworks, and covalent organic frameworks, with potential applications in electrocatalysis, molecular sensing, solid-state [2+2] photo-dimerizations and polymerizations, gas adsorption, inclusion materials, semi conductivity, luminescence, and proton conductivity. Prof. Biradha earned his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Hyderabad, India, in 1997. He completed postdoctoral research at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada (1997–1998), and at Nagoya University in Japan (1998–2002). He has held several editorial and advisory roles throughout his career. He also worked as Associate Editor of Crystal Growth & Design, an ACS publication. With an H-index of 58, Prof. Biradha has published over 240 research articles in reputed international journals.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship, Prof. Biradha is primarily looking to develop methods to reduce carbon dioxide into valuable small molecules. He is specifically working with MOFs that incorporate electron-rich aromatic struts and redox-active metal centers.

Pranjit Hazarika

Dr. Pranjit Hazarika has a PhD from IIT Kharagpur and is currently serving as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Geological Sciences, Gauhati University. He was a recipient of the prestigious Young Scientist Medal of the Indian National Science Academy in 2020.

Dr. Hazarika applies elemental and isotopic compositions of rocks and minerals to study ore deposits, their formation mechanisms, and evolution. Dr. Hazarika and his research group at Gauhati University combine forward thermodynamic modelling with elemental mass balance and stable isotope fractionation calculations to comprehend origin of ore-forming hydrothermal fluids and petrogenesis of crustal rocks in diverse tectonic settings.

At Caltech as a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellow, Dr Hazarika is testing results of thermodynamic modelling against elemental and isotopic data of natural samples from the Himalayas to distinguish between some possible models of crustal melting in the Himalayan Mountain belt. He will further assess the conditions that may result in critical metal enrichment during crustal melting and fractional crystallization of magma in orogenic belts.

Gangadhar J. Sanjayan

Prof. Gangadhar J. Sanjayan is a Chief Scientist and Professor of Chemistry at CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory, Pune. He received his PhD from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Oxford, UK. His research interests are in the area of molecular self-assembly, nature-inspired materials, smart/functional polymers and medicinal chemistry. Over the years, his group developed diverse classes of self-assembling systems with intriguing structural features and application scopes in polymer/material sciences. Sanjayan has published several seminal papers in prestigious journals such as the Journal of American Chemical Society, ChemComm and others and has several patents to his credit. He is a recipient of the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award, among several other coveted awards.

In the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence project, Prof. Sanjayan is focusing on developing supramolecular polymers and bio-inspired materials carrying de novo designed self-assembling bifacial G-C nucleobase building blocks and investigating their structural features and properties. Supramolecular polymers as a class of structurally intricate macromolecules are growing in prominence, owing primarily to their immense potential in applied research and practical utility in everyday life.

Priti Gupta

Dr. Priti Gupta is a neuroscientist and Director of Research at Project Prakash, an Indo-US initiative that aims at alleviating curable childhood blindness in India while also demystifying how the human brain learns to see. She got her PhD in Computational Neuroscience from Dayalbagh University and received her post-doctoral training in Cognitive Neuroscience at IIT Delhi. Dr Gupta’s research interests include visual and cognitive development and learning and brain plasticity. As a scientist at Project Prakash, Dr Gupta has worked extensively with children treated for congenital cataracts to understand how vision develops after prolonged visual deprivation. Her work in visual development has featured in several top-tier journals including Science.

To tackle the broad goal of understanding visual development, one needs to adopt a multifaceted approach that merges work with both typically and atypically developing children, and computational modeling. To complement her expertise of working with atypically developing children, as a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence scholar Dr Gupta is acquiring experimental and analytical skills at the Nelson Lab at Harvard University to study typically developing children. Through well-designed studies with babies and toddlers her goal is to characterize the development of temporal vision, thereby furthering the understanding of the critical role time plays in perceptual organization.