Archives: Meet Our India Fulbrighters
Ananya Sinha
Ananya Sinha is an officer of the Indian Revenue Service. She has over five years of experience in direct tax administration, during which she has conducted tax assessments of over 300 tax entities ranging from high-net-worth individuals to multinational companies and NGOs. She has conducted tax outreach programs in her assigned jurisdiction and has also been part of tax enforcement operations. She has been responsible for the revenue administration of one of India’s oldest and largest business districts, Chandni Chowk – known for its bazaars for the last 500 years. She has also garnered field-level experience of the implementation of historic direct tax policy measures like Operation Clean Money launched after the announcement of demonetization in November, 2016.
In her current role as Deputy Commissioner of Income Tax, Ms Sinha is part of the team that is responsible for policy formulation with respect to the newly launched Faceless Appeal Scheme, 2021. The scheme is a, one of its kind, global initiative designed with the objective to make tax administration more efficient, transparent, and accountable through the use of technology. Ms Sinha provides policy inputs in respect of this scheme to the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT)- the apex direct tax body in India.
She is an Economics Graduate and holds a Bachelor in Law from the University of Delhi. She also has a Postgraduate Diploma in Business Law from the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru.
As a Humphrey fellow, she wishes to pursue interdisciplinary engagement aiming to understand and study the organization and taxation of the real estate sector. She wishes to enrich her insights through a cross-country comparison of the taxation of the real estate sector in other developing countries. She hopes that these insights gathered during the course of the fellowship will help her in contributing to the development of a more nuanced policy that can have a significant impact in increasing the revenue generated from the real estate sector.
Ashish Tiwari
Ashish Tiwari is currently a Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering at IIT Gandhinagar. He obtained his MTech in electrical engineering from IIT Gandhinagar in 2020. He is the recipient of the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship (PMRF) 2020-2024. His research interest lies at the intersection of computer vision, computer graphics, and deep learning with a primary focus on inferring the 3D world from image(s) through photometric methods such as photometric stereo, Shape from Polarization (SfP), and photo-polarimetric stereo. He was awarded the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) 2023-2024 for his project proposal, “Photometric Stereo for Refractive Objects.” He was a part of the core organizing team of ICVGIP 2022, held at IIT Gandhinagar. He was also a part of the Google Research Week 2023.
As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at Rice University, Houston, TX, Ashish is investigating a scene’s geometry, material, and lighting through a sparse set of images captured through hand-held acquisition devices such as smartphones. Ashish enjoys teaching and has delivered plenty of invited talks on his research on photometric stereo. He likes singing, sketching, playing outdoor sports, especially cricket, and long-hour endurance runs. He also enjoys interacting with people from different regions and cultures and involves himself in community services.
Ashish Tiwari
Ashish Tiwari graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, West Bengal with a BTech and MTech in computer science and engineering in 2007. A 2012 batch Indian Police Service (IPS) officer of Uttar Pradesh cadre, Ashish has held positions of ASP Jhansi, SP rural Varanasi, SP Mirzapur, SSP Etah, SP Jaunpur, SSP Ayodhya, Founder Commandant-Special Security Force (SSF), SP Election (Uttar Pradesh), and SSP Firozabad. He was recognized as one of the 40 promising global leaders in policing by the IACP (International Association of Chiefs of Police, U.S.A.), who mentioned him in their ‘40 under 40’ list in 2022. He also received the Young Alumni Achiever award from IIT Kharagpur.
Ashish is passionate about SMART (simple and sensitive, moral and modern, accountable, reliable and responsive, trained and technical) policing. He believes in technology, innovations, and entrepreneurial government with a people-centric approach. He has launched multiple technology initiatives to realize SMART policing, which have been institutionalized at the state level and have impacted millions of citizens. He is also a member of various committees, and has been a keynote speaker at many conferences on modernizing policing using technology. To empower women, Ashish has constituted a ‘green group’ of rural women to fight problems of drugs, alcohol, gambling, and domestic violence in various districts. Leveraging technology, under ‘Operation Smile’ in west Uttar Pradesh, Ashish has reunited hundreds of missing children and victims of child trafficking with their families. His innovative strategies in community policing, countering fake news, and digital governance have received public and professional appreciation and widespread media coverage. Ashish has received numerous accolades, including the FICCI smart police officer award, the SKOCH award, the gFiles governance award, triple DGP Commendation (silver, gold, and platinum) discs, and the State Award for Best Electoral Practices.
As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Ashish is engaged in developing innovative solutions for smart governance and smart policing at the intersection of technology, security, and development. He intends to work at both the federal and the state level to apply new technologies in security and governance.
Sonaleeca Das
Ms. Sonaleeca Das is a science teacher at Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya in Tenughat of Bokaro district in the state of Jharkhand. She has been teaching science to middle-school learners for eighteen years. She has an integrated bachelor’s degree in science and education from Regional Institute of Education, Bhubaneswar.
She is actively involved in planning and organizing science exhibitions, exposure visits to science centres, mentor talks, and workshops on nurturing design thinking among the middle-grade learners for their successful participation in national-level science competitions. In 2016 she received the Navodaya National Incentive Award for her contributions in the field of teaching learning in one of the remote north-eastern regions of India.
During her participation in the Fulbright DAI program, Sonaleeca plans to explore methods to nurture, develop, and scaffold reflection as a skill among the middle-school learners in science. She believes that the skill of reflection should help the current generation of learners to listen to their internal voice, to make meaning of their experiences and develop the ability to receive comments, suggestions, evaluations, and feedback. The learning and findings from her project will guide her to redesign the experiential learning process in her school. She plans to disseminate learnings from this project through research publications and workshops with fellow teachers.
Nilam Thakkar
Ms. Nilam Thakkar is an educator with over 15 years of experience at NGO Manav Sadhna. Through its Prathma remedial education program, she has been teaching 4th and 5th graders while serving as Principal, and training 12 teachers on holistic values-based education. She also developed the Prathma curriculum, which includes workbooks, assessments, and teacher training modules.
She holds a Primary Teacher’s Training diploma (PTC), a B.Ed., and an MA from Gujarat University. She has pursued professional development through programs such as Social Emotional Learning (SEL) facilitation, done pedagogy training with Teach for India, and Waldorf Education training. Her dedication to education has been recognized with the Women of Excellence Award (2023) and the Wonder Woman Award (2019).
Since 2016, she has been a member of the selection committee of the Gujarat State Child Care and Protection Department, selecting members for the Child Welfare Committee and Juvenile Justice Board across 33 districts.
As a Fulbright DAI fellow, Nilam aims to explore innovative educational approaches to address the psychological, social, and emotional challenges faced by children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Her project focuses on creating sustainable interventions to enhance students’ cognitive skills, motivation, and self-confidence. She plans to design a teacher’s guide and training modules to empower teachers and foster supportive learning environments. Her vision is to integrate these strategies into her school system and share her learnings with NGOs and schools, ensuring holistic child development and academic progress for underserved communities.
Mukesh Kumar
Mr. Mukesh Kumar is a School Lecturer with the Government of Rajasthan and has over 18 years of rich teaching experience. As an educator and author, he has written 31 books on English Literature, comprising academic guides and poetry collections. His work includes comprehensive guides on Shakespeare, cultural studies, and preparation materials for UGC−NET and examination for assistant professor. Mr. Kumar holds a master’s degree in English and is dedicated to fostering academic excellence and personal growth in his students.
During his participation in the Fulbright DAI program, Mukesh is exploring innovative approaches to ethical integration of AI with education. He aims to enhance teaching methodologies and develop strategies to improve students’ critical thinking and literary appreciation skills. Upon returning to India, he intends to implement AI-driven educational tools in the classroom, develop new curriculum materials incorporating ethical AI usage, and conduct workshops for fellow educators. He trusts that these efforts will help cascade his learnings to the broader educational community and transform the teaching-learning scenario in government schools across Rajasthan and beyond.
Joyeeta Banerjee
Ms. Joyeeta Banerjee is an assistant teacher at Nikunjapur High School teaching English as Second Language (ESL) to the rural learners of secondary and higher secondary grades for the past 23 years. She holds a master’s degree in English from the University of Burdwan and a master’s in education from Rabindra Bharati University.
She is the cultural coordinator of her school and after school hours, actively engages in teaching English to disadvantaged learners. She appeared in the critically acclaimed movie Kalamkathi, screened in the environment category of the 29th Kolkata International Film Festival. She has published many articles. Her book review was featured in the prestigious Bengali quarterly Anustup. She was a recipient of the National Child Rights Research Fellowship in 2012.
As a Fulbright fellow, Joyeeta is exploring theoretical and practical issues related to ESL pedagogy. It will be useful in delineating a plan of action to foster meaningful learning for the first-generation learners in her ESL classrooms. She intends to publish her findings and her experiences both in academic journals and popular magazines and newspapers. She is interested in conducting workshops and seminars at the grassroots for the benefit of her school and community.
Sanskriti
Ms. Sanskriti is a Shyama Prasad Mukherjee (SPM) fellow at the Agri-Biotechnology Division of National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute (NABI), Mohali, Punjab. She is particularly passionate about changing the perspective of the people of our country regarding genetically modified (GM) crops, making them aware about the potential offered by advanced biotechnological tools and how they can help humanity in the future. She is interested in the cutting-edge technology of CRISPR/Cas, especially because of its potential to generate non-transgenic plants with desired mutations much more quickly than any other breeding practice.
Because of this interest, in her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Sanskriti is experimenting with the potential of sgRNA/Cas ribonucleoproteins (RNPs) to produce precise mutations in protoplasts of major crops and generate whole plants thereof. The plants will be free from any foreign substances because of the short half-life of RNPs, and therefore have a potential for general public acceptance.
Before joining NABI, Sanskriti received both her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Botany from Panjab University, Chandigarh. She received a DST-INSPIRE Scholarship throughout her B.Sc. and M.Sc. programs. She was a gold medallist in her bachelor’s, and ranked 11th in the CSIR-UGC-JRF, 2017. She availed the UGC Junior Research Fellowship till December 2019. From January 2020, she has been working as an Shyama Prasad Mukherjee (SPM) fellow at NABI. Her work has been published in reputed international journals and she has also presented her work in multiple reputed international conferences.
Anchal Sharma
Ms. Anchal Sharma is a Ph.D. candidate at IIT Delhi. Her research encompasses tactile perception of objects in the visually challenged. Drawn towards innovations exercising imagination, scientific thinking, and strong user empathy, she has mentored and participated in diverse social innovation projects and won two awards by IISc, Bangalore and IIT-Delhi with her team. She has led and been a speaker in events propagating innovation including those by AIM, NITI AYOG.
She completed her M.Des. in Industrial design (from SPA, New Delhi) and interned at GVIC, PepsiCo, India. She was acknowledged for her thesis work for integrating cultural spatial forms in a unique product using principles of light and shadows to educate children about unity. The project was sponsored by the Design Clinic Scheme by GoI and NID and was featured as a finalist in Toycathon 2021 and TISDC 2018. During her B.Arch. she emerged as a 2nd ranker both for her thesis work on ‘a school for experiential learning’ and overall 5-year academic performance.
In her Fulbright-Nehru project, she will analyse how to better convey three-dimensionality in two-dimensional tactile stimuli. Although layered and complex, she believes with continual deep-work and problem-solving acumen, this work can profoundly advance and contribute towards accessible STEM education for those without vision.
She believes in a multi-faceted growth and commends the perseverance sports can bring to life. She has played Throwball at National level and won silver medal (Badminton) at college level. Being perceptive towards life, she exercises self-expression through art, writing, and short videos.