Meet Our India Fulbrighters Archive - Page 3 of 52

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.

Amiya Kumar Jana

Dr. Amiya K. Jana is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur. He has received research funds as principal investigator from DST, DAE (BRNS), CSIR, MHRD, and ISRO, among others. He has authored over 150 research articles in several international journals of repute. He is the sole author of three textbooks in the area of numerical analysis, modeling, simulation and control.

Dr. Jana has received numerous awards and recognitions, including Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK, 2023), Faculty Excellence Award (IIT Kharagpur, 2021), Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany, 2017), inclusion in World’s Top 2% Scientists list (Stanford University, 2020 – 24), and is an editorial board member of Scientific Reports (Nature Group) and Frontiers in Control Engineering (Frontiers Publisher, Switzerland). His research focuses on renewable energy, clean fuel, desalination, process integration and control.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Jana is planning to work on the proton exchange membrane fuel cell with its optimization and control by the use of AI-based state estimator.

Debabrata Goswami

Prof. Debabrata Goswami joined IIT Kanpur as an associate professor in 2003, became a professor in 2010, and became a Professor with Higher Academic Grade (HAG) in 2017. He also held the five-year term of Prof. S. Sampath Chair-Professorship from 2018 at IIT Kanpur. He has received several awards and recognition for his research, which includes the Hoechst Advanced Technology Division Industrial Affiliates Fellowship for outstanding academic record in Princeton, the International Senior Research Fellowship award of the Wellcome Trust (UK), the Swarnajayanti Fellowship of the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, and Thathachary Science Award (India). He is a Fellow of Optica (previously OSA), the Institute of Physics, the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. His work in ultrafast optics and light-matter interactions has also been recognized by the 2019 Galileo Galilei Award of the International Commission of Optics. Prof. Goswami has published over 175 research articles in internationally reputed journals, several book chapters, and edited conference proceedings and books.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellow, Prof. Goswami is focusing on advancing femtosecond laser applications for laser machining toward nanofabrication, including additive and subtractive fabrication projects using ultrafast and multiphoton optical processes and thermal dynamics. His research will delve into the quantum processes initiated by femtosecond laser pulses interacting with materials, and this work promises to yield innovative tools and technologies with broad applications across science and industry.

Nitya Nand Gosvami

Dr. Nitya Nand Gosvami completed his BTech with honors in Metallurgical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology – Banaras Hindu University (IITBHU), India, in 2003 and completed his PhD at the National University of Singapore in 2008. In 2008, he joined the Leibniz Institute for New Materials (Saarbrücken, Germany) as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. In 2010, he joined University College London (London, United Kingdom) as a Research Associate, jointly working with the London Center for Nanotechnology. In 2012, he moved to the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Pennsylvania (United States) as a Research Project Manager. In 2016, he joined the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi (New Delhi, India), where he works as an Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Dr. Gosvami’s research is focused on the study of mechanical and tribological behavior of engineering materials, disordered systems, and bioinspired nanopatterned surfaces at the nanoscale, where his group is investigating fundamental mechanisms of friction and wear, lubrication, and tribochemical processes in sliding contacts at the liquid-solid interfaces.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Gosvami is aiming to develop atomic-scale insights into how nanoparticles, when incorporated into industrial lubricants, reduce friction and wear between sliding contacts of mechanical components, including internal combustion engine components, electric vehicle transmissions, and wind turbine bearings. The goal is to establish a scientific basis for developing next-generation environment-friendly and energy-efficient lubricant formulations, enabling the adoption of green technologies by addressing major reliability issues in electric vehicles and wind turbines.

Debapriya Basu Roy

Dr. Debapriya Basu Roy received his PhD degree from IIT Kharagpur and was a post-doctoral fellow with the Technical University of Munich. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. His research interests include applied cryptography, hardware security, post-quantum cryptography, side channel analysis and digital VLSI. Some of his notable contributions in the domain of hardware security are efficient implementation of elliptic curve cryptography, side-channel leakage quantification and implementation of post-quantum cryptography on FPGAs.

In the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence project, Dr. Basu Roy is aiming to implement and perform side channel analysis of a post-quantum secure lattice-based cryptographic algorithm. Due to the advancement of quantum computing, the security guarantees of public key algorithms have come under serious threat. In this project, Dr. Basu Roy’s aim is to develop a unified hardware implementation of three lattice-based cryptographic algorithms and perform a holistic side-channel analysis of the developed architecture.

Neha Sardana

Dr. Neha Sardana is an Associate Professor in the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering (MME) at IIT Ropar. She received her BTech in MME from the IIT Roorkee in 2009, master’s in materials and manufacturing engineering from Technical University of Denmark in 2011 and a PhD in plasmonics from the International Max Planck Research Schools for Science and Technology of Nanostructures, IMPRS-MLU, Halle, Germany in 2015. After working for more than three years as a scientist at Institute of Nano Science and Technology, Mohali, Punjab and a short stint as an Assistant Professor at IIT Jodhpur, she joined IIT Ropar in 2018. Currently, she is the group leader of Nano Scale Engineering and Devices Lab at IIT Ropar. She is a member of Indian National Young Academy of Sciences (2021-26), young engineer awardee from Institute of Engineers India 2022 and young associate of Indian National Academy of Engineering 2023. She has more than 50 publications, eight book chapters, eight Indian patents and a startup on optical sensing to her credit.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr Sardana is focusing primarily on creating optical substrates for accurate monitoring of organochlorine agrochemicals. She will be exploring the use of MXenes to improve optical sensors when coupled with conventional plasmonic materials in an optical SPR-based sensing platform. The proposed study can be instrumental to the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology between India and the United States.

Nirupam Roy

Dr. Nirupam Roy is an Associate Professor and Convener of the Joint Astronomy Programme in the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. He did MSc (2005) and PhD (2009) in Physics from the National Center for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA-TIFR). Subsequently, Dr. Roy was a Jansky Fellow (2009-12) at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, USA, and then a Humboldt Fellow (2013-15) at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn. He worked as an Assistant Professor of the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur (2015-16), before joining IISc in 2016. Dr. Roy has been awarded the Young Scientist Medal by the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) in 2013 and the Laxminarayana & Nagalaxmi Modali award of the Astronomical Society of India (ASI) in 2024. He has also served as one of the Ambassador Scientists of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in India during 2018-24.

The primary expertise of Dr. Roy is in the field of radio astronomy, and his research interests include study of the ISM and star formation, galactic novae, and observational cosmology.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Roy is planning to study low-frequency diffuse radio emission from Milky Way, other galaxies and galaxy clusters. These will be used to explore the nature of astrophysical turbulence as well as to address some of the challenges of detecting the cosmological 21-cm signal.