Archives: Meet Our India Fulbrighters

Arka Banerjee

Arka Banerjee is a Ph.D. candidate at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Studying Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sample quality by computationally efficient estimation of the asymptotic covariance matrices in the multidimensional MCMC setup is the main focus of his doctoral thesis. He has published in reputed journals and has participated in and presented papers at national and international conferences.

Arka holds a bachelor’s and a master’s in statistics from the University of Calcutta. Before joining IIT Kanpur, he was a data analyst at Infosys Limited for a year where he worked on a financial modeling project that dealt with the prediction of default payments in a banking institution.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at the University of Minnesota, Arka is exploring the computationally efficient and optimized procedures in the estimation of asymptotic covariance matrices in MCMC for a better understanding of MCMC sample quality. During his grant period, he will be studying MCMC sample quality in a high dimensional setting. Arka enjoys travelling and cooking different culinary dishes.

Kaushiki Arha

Kaushiki Arha is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has a master’s in political science from the same centre, and a bachelor’s from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi. She is interested in researching the intersection of gender, politics, and law. Her doctoral project explores the politics of rape law reform in India with a focus on the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 2013. Her work seeks to investigate how rape myths enter legal discourse and its political implications for women demanding a world without sexual violence.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, Kaushiki is working with Prof. Vera Bergelson to develop a comparative analysis of the criminal justice systems in India and the United States of America with a focus on rape cases.

Supongsenla Ao

Supongsenla Ao is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the National Institute of Technology, Silchar, Assam. Her research focuses on utilizing waste materials to synthesize biofuels, driven by the imperative to find sustainable energy solutions amidst escalating global energy demands and environmental concerns.

With a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from St. Joseph’s College, Nagaland University, and a master’s degree from Kumaon University, Uttarakhand, Supongsenla has actively engaged in building the gaps between her Naga community and diverse Indian culture throughout her college days. She was ranked 10th in chemistry honours during her bachelor’s degree and also served as a class representative.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, Supongsenla is exploring large-scale biofuel production for industrialization in India, particularly investigating the limitation of microwave reactor mechanism for bulk synthesis, aiming to overcome challenges such as active site leaching, water by-product interference and catalyst stability for sustainable biofuel production. She enjoys hiking and gardening in her free time.

Lubhanshi

Lubhanshi is a Ph.D. candidate at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Mumbai. Her thesis focuses on the specificity of effector proteases towards host proteins that are crucial in host proteasomal degradation pathways. Using techniques such as fluorescence spectroscopy and mutational analysis, she is looking for the mechanism of selective recognition of ubiquitin-like proteins by deubiquitinating enzymes.

Lubhanshi holds a bachelor’s degree in science from Kurukshetra University, and a master’s degree in chemistry from Guru Jambeshwar University of Science and Technology, Haryana. As a researcher, she likes to participate in science outreach programs.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Lubhanshi is exploring the host pathways that are affected by the deubiquitinating enzymes. Primarily, her focus lies in understanding how various effector proteases impact the host’s ubiquitination machinery, thereby facilitating the pathogens’ survival and replication. In her leisure time, she likes to sketch and paint. She enjoys travelling and exploring nature and diverse food from various cultures.

Satyajit Sahu

Dr. Satyajit Sahu has been serving as an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics, IIT Jodhpur since 2021. He earned his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute for the Cultivation of Science in 2009 and completed his postdoctoral research at the National Institute for Materials Science, Japan, in 2012. He then joined the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur as an Assistant Professor in 2013. Dr Sahu has been honored with several prestigious awards, including the SPARC DUO fellowship in 2019 and the BRICS Young Scientist Forum award in 2020. In 2022, he was awarded the SERB SIRE fellowship for collaborative research at the University of Toronto. His current research focuses on the study of semiconductor devices utilizing quantum dots, 2D materials, and organic materials, with a particular interest in exploring the use of single molecules for electronic applications. He has authored over 80 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence scholar, Dr. Sahu is concentrating on the synthesis and characterization of double halide perovskite materials to develop memristors with enhanced performance. He aims to explore the potential application of these memristors in neuromorphic systems, seeking to improve their efficiency and functionality.

Sriparna Saha

Dr. Sriparna Saha is currently serving as an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Patna, India. She has authored or co-authored more than 400 papers. Her current research interests include machine-learning, deep-learning, natural-language-processing, and biomedical-information-extraction. She is the recipient of Google-India-Women-in-Engineering-Award-2008, NASI-Young-Scientist-Platinum-Jubilee-Award-2016, BIRD Award-2016, IEI-Young-Engineers’-Award-2016, SERB-Women-in-Excellence-Award-2018, Pattern-Recognition-Letters-Editor-Award-2023, prestigious “Young-Faculty-Research-Fellowship” under Visvesvaraya-PhD-Scheme for Electronics-&-IT for-5-years (Jan 2019-Jan 2024), Humboldt-Research-Fellowship, Indo-U.S.-Fellowship-for-Women-in-STEMM-2018. She won the best paper awards in ICONIP 2023, CLINICAL-NLP workshop of COLING 2016, and Area-chair-award (Information Extraction) at IJCNLP-AACL 2023.

With her Fulbright fellowship, at University of South Carolina, Sriparna is working towards developing some unified large language models (LLM) for low-resource settings. In general, it has been shown in the recent literature that the existing LLMs are not performing well for low resource Indian languages like Bengali. This disparity raises concerns about the fairness of LLMs, as it may lead to biased outcomes and unequal access to information and resources for speakers of low-resource languages. In this project Sriparna aims to develop some LLMs for low-resource language setting by developing a scalable training approach using reinforcement learning from human feedback.

Ujjwal Maulik

Prof. Ujjwal Maulik is a full Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jadavpur University since 2004. He was also the former head of the same department. He has worked in many universities and research laboratories in Australia, China, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Slovenia and U.S. and also delivered lectures in many more countries. He is the Fellow of India (INAE), India, National Academy of Science India (NASI), International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), US, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), U.S., Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), Singapore and Distinguish Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He is a Distinguish Speaker of IEEE as well as ACM. His research interests include machine learning, pattern analysis, data science, bioinformatics and computational biology, multi-objective optimization, social networking, IoT and autonomous car. In these areas he has published ten books, more than three hundred fifty papers, mentored several start-ups, filed several patents and already guided twenty five doctoral students. His other interests include outdoor sports and classical music.

During his tenure as Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship Prof. Maulik is working for the better understanding of newly developed NicE-seq technology for chromatin accessibility through the application of artificial intelligence (AI) methods. This research has the potential to uncover novel regulatory mechanisms and advance our understanding of the functional genomics landscape. The AI-driven approaches can expedite and enhance chromatin accessibility studies, leading to advancements in various fields, including gene regulation, disease mechanisms, and therapeutic development.

Pradeep Kumar Misra

Prof. Pradeep Kumar Misra is a Professor and Director of the Centre for Policy Research in Higher Education (CPRHE) at the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA), New Delhi. His research specializations are higher education, teacher education, and educational technology.

He has received several prestigious international research scholarships like the Commonwealth Academic Fellowship of CSC, UK; Doctoral and Senior Researcher Scholarship of DAAD, Germany; Erasmus Mundus Visiting Scholar Scholarship of European Commission; National Scholarship of Slovak Republic; MASHAV Scholarship of Israel Government; and Research Exchange Scholarship of FMSH, France.

He widely published nationally and internationally, completed research and development projects, and developed educational media programs. His recent books, Teaching Competencies for 21st Century Teachers: Practical Approaches to Learning (Routledge, 2024) and Learning and Teaching for Teachers (Springer, 2021), impact teachers’ teaching practices globally.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship, Prof. Misra is examining the policies and practices of different U.S. universities to gain insights into how they integrate technology to offer EQUAL educational opportunities to their students. Through his research, Prof. Misra aims to benefit Indian and U.S. universities to learn valuable lessons and take necessary cautions when incorporating technology into their academic programs.

Ashutosh Kumar

Ashutosh Kumar is an Associate Professor of History at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. He earned his Ph.D. from the History Department of the University of Delhi, where he also taught from 2012 to 2014. He received South-South Exchange Program for Research on the History of Development (SEPHIS), a Government of Netherlands funded program Fellowship during his Ph.D. He was fellow at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom; Yale University, USA; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, and at Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla. He is president of Indian Association for South Asian Studies (IASAS) and Chairman of Centre for Alternative Studies in Social Sciences, New Delhi.

His most recent publications include Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830-1920’, Cambridge University Press, 2017 and ‘Girmitiyas and Global Indian Diaspora: Origins, Memories and Identities’ Cambridge University Press, 2023.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence scholar, Dr. Kumar is exploring issue of rights of Indian indentured laborers on colonial sugar plantations during nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the letters, petitions and depositions of indentured Indian migrants with a particular emphasis on the letters they wrote in regional Indian language. His project analyses such laborers’ letters and makes the case that Indian indentured laborers were able to fight for their “rights”, natural and contractual with planters and the colonial government through petitions, in addition to being able to voice their feelings and concerns on a variety of other matters.

Manzoor Koyakutty

Dr Manzoor Koyakutty is a Professor at Amrita Center for Nanoscience and Molecular Medicine, Kochi. He has worked extensively in molecular mechanisms responsible for cancer progression, drug-resistance, and tumor immunology, and developed many novel cancer-nanomedicine formulations and immunotherapeutic for leukemia, liver tumor and glioblastoma. His lab currently investigates systemic immune-suppression in peripheral organs as well as local tumor-microenvironment and developing novel nano-bio engineering tools to overcome such immune-suppression.

He has published > 150 papers in peer reviewed journals including Biomaterials, Small, J. of Controlled Release, Sci. Reports, Int. J Immunopharmacology with H-index 48 and citation 10530, and filed 40 patents of which 20 granted and 06 licensed for translational development. He was elected as Fellow of National Academy of Science, India (2017), top 2% scientist by Stanford University rating, 2022, received Amrita University Faculty Gold Medal 2023, and Chancellors Award 2024.

During the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship, he is working with Dr Henry Brem and Dr Betty Tylor, Glioma Center, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, USA, for the combinatorial targeting of brain tumor immuno-biology using intracranially injectable nano-hydrogel system. This work may help glioma patients to have better therapeutic outcome.