Archives: Meet Our India Fulbrighters

Praveen Kumar

Dr. Praveen Kumar is working as an Assistant Professor at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Sciences (IACS), Kolkata. He did his Ph.D. from the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, followed by postdoctoral research at ISOM, UPM Madrid, Spain, as a Marie Curie Fellow. He is an Editorial Board Member of Materials Letters (Elsevier) and Nanotechnology (IOP) Journals. He has served as a Chair, Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), Indian Chapter, funded by the European Commission from May 2017 to July 2021. He is also a member of The National Academy of Sciences (NASI), India and Indian National Young Academy of Sciences (INYAS).

Dr. Kumar’s research contribution covers a broad spectrum of materials science, including III-V semiconductors, 2D-Materials, MXenes, carbon nanostructures, etc., for various energy harvesting (PEC water splitting, CO2 reduction, broadband photodetectors) and storage (supercapacitors) applications. He has authored 89 publications in peer-reviewed international journals, filed 03 patents, more than 75 in conference proceedings, 09 books/chapters, and delivered around 52 invited talks around the globe. He is a recipient of several recognized awards and fellowships, including MRSI Medal 2021, MCAA Societal Impact Award (2019), DAE Young Achiever Award (2019), Micro Internal Travel Grants (MITG), European Commission (2018), BRICS Young Scientist Award (2017), INSPIRE Faculty Award (2014), and the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (2012).

Dr. Kumar’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to develop facile synthesis processes for MXenes heterostructures and establish their optical, electronic, electrical, and magnetic properties by experimental and theoretical means for energy harvesting (water splitting and CO2 reduction) applications. He will also be teaching Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology courses at Drexel University.

Rayson Kayalvarathu Alex

Dr. Rayson K. Alex is Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, K. K. Birla Goa Campus, Goa. His academic work lies in the area of ecocriticism, or broadly environmental humanities (EH) with a specific focus on indigenous nature-cultures and eco-cinema.

Dr. Alex was awarded his Ph.D. in 2011 for his dissertation in ecocriticism from the University of Madras. He is one of the editors of Essays in Ecocriticism (Sarup & Sons, Delhi, 2007), Culture and Media: Ecocritical Explorations (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), Ecodocumentaries: Critical Essays (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and Ecocultural Ethics: Critical Essays (Lexington Books, 2017). He has translated works from Malayalam: Ecocriticism in Malayalam (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022) and E for Elephant: Elephant Tales and More (Green Books, 2022). He is a recipient of the ASLE Translation and Media Subvention Grants and is the Founder and co-Director of the tiNai Ecofilm Festival.

Dr. Alex’s Fulbright-Nehru research in the US is a continuation of his research work in India that focuses on identifying ecological pedagogies in the humanities which will strengthen and systematize formal and informal teaching in the environmental humanities. These pedagogies will be structurally consolidated, evaluated and disseminated in a manner that is beneficial to the scholars and teachers, particularly in India. He also proposes to teach a course titled “Indian Films, Environmental Justice, and the Subaltern” at the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Western Washington University.

Bhangya Bhukya

Dr. Bhangya Bhukya is a Professor of History at the University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. He specializes in Modern Indian History. His research interests include community histories, the effects of power and knowledge, governmentality and dominance, the state and nationalism, intellectual histories of subaltern communities, identity politics by forest and hill people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was a Ford Foundation Fellow (2003-06) and a British Council Visiting Fellow (2010).

Dr. Bhukya did his Ph.D. from the University of Warwick, UK, and his thesis has been published as a book, Subjugated Nomads. The Lambadas under the rule of the Nizams in 2010. He published quite influential books, including The Roots of the Periphery. A history of the Deccan Gonds (2017), History of Modern Telangana (2017) and A Cultural History of Telangana (2021). He is also a public historian and activist involved in India’s Adivasi human rights movements.

Dr. Bhukya proposes to study why British colonial protectionism and post-colonial integrationism/assimilationism did not bring tangible changes in Adivasi life, particularly how these development approaches outweighed Adivasi self-rule and self-determinism; and, consequently, also their political rights. The study is theoretical in its nature, and it interrogates the philosophy, assumptions, and approaches of what is termed ‘Adivasi development’ and proposes to re-investigate what development has actually meant to Adivasis.

Sateesh Bino Sathiadhas

Sateesh Bino is the Deputy Inspector General of Police in the Indian state of Kerala. He is a 2008 batch Indian Police Service officer. He has approximately 15 years of experience, including serving as the police chief in five districts of Kerala where he supervised sensitive investigations, ensured law and order, and initiated several well-appreciated community policing initiatives, specifically focusing on prevention of drug abuse and trafficking. In 2023, Sateesh was a global fellow with the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP). He is a certified Resilience Trainer of the University of Pennsylvania and the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance.

Apart from his professional accomplishments, Sateesh is an avid fitness enthusiast, being an ultra-marathoner and a triathlete. He has completed two full IRONMAN triathlons (Maryland 2022, Texas 2023). He holds a master’s degree in public policy from the Indian School of Business and a doctorate in managerial economics. As a Humphrey Fellow, Sateesh will focus on law and human rights. He intends to study international best practices in ensuring human rights and contribute to the development of standard operating procedures for law enforcement in this direction.

K.R.S. Preethi Meher

Dr. K.R.S. Preethi Meher is Assistant Professor at the Department of Materials Science, School of Technology, Central University of Tamil Nadu, Thiruvarur, Tamil Nadu. She completed her Ph.D. at the Materials Research Center, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru in 2012.

Dr. Meher was the Erasmus Mundus External Cooperation Window WILLPower (EMECW) visiting research fellow in 2010 at the Laboratoire Structures, Properties and Modeling of Solids Laboratory (SPMS), UMR CNRS 8580, CentraleSupélec, Paris-Saclay University, France. She was also a CNRS postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratorie CRISMAT, Caen from 2013-2014 and later served as Research Associate at the Materials Science Group, Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR), Kalpakkam, Tamil Nadu. She has been awarded UGC-DAE-CSR Collaborative Research Scheme for 2022-2025 and is a life member of the Materials Research Society of India (MRSI).

Dr. Meher’s research laboratory at CUTN focuses on the development of new multifunctional materials and electroceramics for energy production, harvesting, and sensing applications. Currently, she works on synthesis, structural and property correlations in novel perovskite halide compositions for photovoltaics. She has published 25 peer-reviewed journal articles and presented several papers at international and national conferences and workshops apart from serving as an invited speaker at various Faculty development programs.

As a Fulbright-Kalam Climate scholar for Academic and Professional Excellence, Dr. Meher is studying novel layered perovskite halide compositions that exhibit excellent optoelectronic properties coupled with very good stability for an enhanced lifetime of the photovoltaic device.

Vasant Matsagar

Prof. Vasant Matsagar is Professor and Dogra Chair at the Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, New Delhi. He obtained his Ph.D. from IIT Bombay in structural engineering.

Prof. Matsagar is serving on editorial boards of reputed journals in various capacities: Editor-in-Chief of Indian Society of Earthquake Technology (ISET Journal) and the Indian Concrete Journal; Associate Editor for “Computational Methods in Structural Engineering” section” of Frontiers in Built Environment; and an editorial board member of Bulletin of New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering, Proceedings of Institution of Civil Engineers: Structures and Buildings, Advances in Civil Engineering, International Journal of Protective Structures, and the journal Architecture, Structures, and Construction. Prof. Matsagar is Founding Director and Fellow of Council of Vibration Specialists, and has received fellowships from Humboldt Foundation, Erasmus, ASEM-DUO India, FEIT Visiting Academic among others. He is also a DAAD (India) Research Ambassador and an elected fellow of the Indian National Academy for Engineering (INAE), the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI), the Institution of Engineers (India), and the Indian Society of Earthquake Technology.

Prof. Matsagar is interested in multi-hazard protection of structures using advanced engineered materials. During his Fulbright-Kalam Climate fellowship for Academic and Professional Excellence at Michigan State University (MSU), Prof. Matsagar is developing a technology for manufacturing biocomposites from agro-residues for gainfully using them in built infrastructure at large-scale as construction materials. By developing a suitable agriculture waste management scheme and implementing it in practice and contributing to sustainability through decarbonized circular economy, this collaborative research work strives for the development of hazard resilient infrastructure in modern cities and towns in both the U.S. and India.

Sonam Sonam

Dr. Sonam obtained her doctorate in earth sciences from the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar in 2019, and her B.Sc.(H) and M.Sc. in geology from Hansraj College, the University of Delhi in 2011 and 2013 respectively. Her specializations are in the field of fluvial geomorphology, hydrology, and geospatial science.

Dr. Sonam was awarded the CSIR-Research Associate grant in the year 2021 and is currently a CSIR-Research Associate at IIT, Gandhinagar. She is also recipient of the CSIR-UGC JRF fellowship in the field of earth, atmospheric, ocean and planetary Sciences 2013-2018, and the DST-SERB International Travel grant to present her work at the European Geosciences Union (EGU), 2018. After her Ph.D., she worked as a post-doctoral Research Associate on the arid zone rivers and biodiversity, as a part of the Gujarat state climate change project under the National Mission for Strategic Knowledge on Climate Change, DST, Government of India.

Dr. Sonam’s Fulbright-Kalam Climate fellowship for Postdoctoral Research project is regarding environmental flow modelling for sustainable management of river systems. To understand the gravity of the crisis associated with degraded river health and to ensure sustainable development for all stakeholders, a combined socio-hydro-geomorphic approach, including indigenous knowledge and geospatial techniques, is needed. However, this integrated strategy lacks well-defined methodology. Dr. Sonam is using geospatial tools and integrating them with indigenous knowledge to model environmental flow needed to ensure a healthy functioning river: geospatial techniques are used to analyze river morphological susceptibility to exogenous forcing and indigenous knowledge is used to explain a river’s flow requirements at local scales.

Aashna Sharma

Dr. Aashna Sharma is Senior Project Associate at the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun. She completed her B.Sc. (Hons) in 2011 and M.Sc. (Hons.) in 2013 in zoology from Panjab University (PU), Chandigarh. She has a Ph.D. from the Department of Zoology, PU and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), under joint supervision of Dr. Y.K. Rawal and Dr J.A. Johnson. Her doctoral research focused on assessing the climate change and invasion impacts on native Himalayan fishes, and on developing state-of-the-art models for their conservation.

Dr. Sharma has worked in various capacities at WII, contributing to the assessment of climate change impacts on various taxa of lotic ecosystems. She qualified the UGC-NET and GATE exams, apart from receiving several honors and awards, including the Best Popular Science Story award under the DST-Augmenting Writing Skills for Articulating Research (AWSAR) and best oral presentation awards at various research seminars. She has served as an invited speaker for various national and international seminars. Dr. Sharma is also Review Editor of Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Large-bodied freshwater fauna or megafauna are witnessing extensive declines in the Anthropocene, and climate change is expected to exacerbate the situation owing to their extinction-prone traits. Their defaunations are more feared in nations like India that are biologically diverse yet anthropically populous. Through the Fulbright-Kalam Climate fellowship for Postdoctoral Research, Dr. Sharma aims to identify conservation hotspots for megafauna in India by assessing the impacts of future climate and land-use changes.

Bokinala Moses Abraham

Dr. Bokinala Moses Abraham is National Postdoctoral Fellow in the group of Prof. Jayant K. Singh at IIT-Kanpur, which focuses on fusing density functional theory simulations with modern machine learning approaches to rationalize and accelerate the chemical design and discovery of novel materials. Dr. Abraham obtained his first-class B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in physics from Acharya Nagarjuna University, Guntur, Andhra Pradesh. Thereafter, he moved to the University of Hyderabad for a Ph.D. degree, where he pursued his own research ideas that enabled him to tackle multidisciplinary problems, such as those related to the study of materials at high-pressures, and understanding the physico-chemical properties of high-energy density materials.

Dr. Abraham has contributed to nearly 45 international publications in peer-reviewed journals. He has received several prestigious and competitive fundings for attending international conferences, which includes the RSC travel grant and the International Travel Support grant offered by Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Government of India. He also received funding from high parallel-computing HPC-Europa3 mobility program (2022) for a research stay of 3 months at the University of Barcelona (UB), Spain with Prof. Dr. Francesc Illas’ group. Dr. Abraham’s work towards design and development of highly efficient catalysts for CO2 conversion and hydrogen evolution reaction are seminal contributions to the field of catalysis.

Dr. Abraham is designing and developing a library of unique and fascinating MXene-supported single atom catalysts by fusing modern machine-learning approaches with experimental techniques during the Fulbright-Kalam Climate fellowship for Postdoctoral Research. Dr. Abraham believes that the scientific knowledge generated from this project would be utilized as a reference for CO2 reduction into hydrocarbon fuels, thereby helping meet real-world energy demands in a sustainable manner.

Rizana Salim

Ms. Rizana Salim is pursuing her Ph.D. from the Aerosol group, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai under the guidance of Prof. Sachin S Gunthe. She completed her B.Tech. in civil engineering from the Royal College of Engineering and Technology, Kerala, and M.Tech. from the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, in remote sensing and GIS. At present, her research focuses on experimental and modelling studies to investigate the role of atmospheric aerosols, as physiological sources of reactive oxygen and chlorine species, in producing oxidative stress in the lungs and the resulting health impacts.

Ms. Salim’s upbringing in the mountains made her closely connected to nature and instilled in her a strong belief that we always get what we give. Hence, she believes it is an individual’s responsibility to gift the environment a token of gratitude. Her subject of research is her token of gratitude for the air we breathe. She loves to paint, read and travel.

As a Fulbright-Kalam Climate fellow, Ms. Salim is doing her experimental work at the University of California, Irvine under the guidance of Prof. Manabu Shiraiwa. Ms. Salim is conducting detailed analysis and advanced research using electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer and high-resolution mass spectrometer (HRMS) and other experimental methods for the detection and quantification of radical species and to understand the toxicity and oxidative potential of these radicals.