Meet Our India Fulbrighters Archive - Page 9 of 52

Nipun Jain

Mr. Nipun Jain is a PhD candidate at the Department of Materials Engineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru. His doctoral thesis focuses on developing a 3D bioprinted lungs-on-a-dish platform to investigate pulmonary fibrosis. He employs extrusion bioprinting and cultures the prepared lung tissue at an air-liquid interface which also incorporates advanced material characterizations to examine cellular structural morphology and functional expression.

Nipun holds a bachelor’s degree in biotechnology from Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi. He has completed multiple internship projects offered by the Indian Academy of Sciences prior to joining the PhD program at IISc. He is a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship (PMRF) and has published several research and review papers. He has also participated and presented his work at various national and international conferences.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at The Pennsylvania State University, Nipun is integrating 3D bioprinting with microfluidics to provide more reproducible insights into disease progression for evaluating therapeutic efficacy. The insights gained from his research will contribute to translation of novel drug screening platforms for pulmonary fibrosis and other lung-related disorders. When not in the lab, he can be found reading non-fiction or playing games. He is a music enthusiast, enjoys playing the guitar and is fond of travelling to explore new places for food.

Lokeswari Malepati

Ms. Lokeswari is a direct PhD candidate at the Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Telangana. Her research focusses on developing computer vision algorithms suitable for usage in combination with drones for assessment of structures. She leverages multi-modal imaging and deep learning models for quantification of surface and subsurface damages in infrastructure.

Lokeswari holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. She has two years of experience in L&T’s research and testing laboratory where she worked on evaluating the suitability of lightweight concrete for structural applications and developing alternative connections for precast wall panels.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at University of Houston, Texas, Lokeswari is implementing the developed algorithms in the field for bridge inspections using drones. This research aims to evaluate the performance of these algorithms under practical scenarios and propose modifications to their architecture and training strategies. This work contributes to advancing unmanned aerial vehicle-based technologies for faster and more efficient structural assessments. In her free time, Lokeswari enjoys playing volleyball and table tennis.

Lalremruati

Ms. Lalremruati is a PhD candidate at the School of English Language Education at The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in linguistics, both from EFLU Hyderabad. Before her doctoral journey, she served as an assistant professor of English at the College of Horticulture, Central Agricultural University, Mizoram.

Her doctoral research is an ethnographic exploration of grassroots-level implementation of English language education policies in Mizoram. Her research focuses on the lived experiences of English teachers in government schools, examining how they navigate, negotiate, and recontextualize a technologically assisted program in their resource-challenged contexts.

As a Junior Research Fellow, Lalremruati has presented her work at several prestigious conferences in India and abroad on how teachers recontextualize policy measures. She is an active member of the History of English Language Education (HELE) Studies Society, India, where she disseminates the history of English language education in Mizoram through conferences and publications.

Through the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Fellowship, Lalremruati is acquiring a cross-cultural comparative perspective on how language education policies affect minority groups in low-resource contexts. Her goal is to contribute to equitable and inclusive education for marginalized communities. In her free time, she enjoys watching documentaries on pretty much anything. She also writes whimsical little poems on her Instagram account.

Khadija Aslam

Khadija Aslam is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. She has completed her Masters in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University and her B.Sc. in Economics from Presidency university. She has previously received the Ford Foundation fellowship for academic excellence in her master’s programme and has qualified the UGC-NET exam for assistant professorship in India. She has also been a recipient of the JRF and the SRF fellowship.

Khadija’s interest lies at the intersection of behavioural economics and development economics. How difference in religious beliefs and cultural practices transcends into varying social choices and economic outcomes prompted her research on the influence of religion on borrowing behaviour. In her earlier work, she has explored the differential impact socio-religious groups have on child health outcomes. Through her research, Khadija aims to understand how the tenets of Islam can influence a Muslim’s preference and the institutions that may then emerge as an outcome of this interaction. She believes that while religious or cultural norms may be perceived as hard to rationalize or too outdated to internalize, what economists often oversee is that these set of traditions when followed by a sizeable group of people and over a long period, in itself may trigger alternative structures conducive to existing institutions thereby generating a sub-economy.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow at Barnard College, Columbia University, Khadija examines the impact of residential segregation on intergenerational mobility in educational outcomes. Drawing on historical data on urban planning within cities, her research investigates how patterns of segregation and class dynamics shape access to opportunities and produce long-lasting effects across generations.

Besides Economics, Khadija enjoys good conversations, good food and sitcoms.

Jaya Mathur

Ms. Jaya Mathur is a PhD Candidate at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She holds an MA in sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University and a BA in philosophy from Hindu College, University of Delhi. Her research interests include ethnographic and historical studies of evidentiality and truth-making practices in medicine, cultures of expertise, practices of the body and quantification, patient-centeredness, global pharmaceutical trajectories, medical technologies, and contested disease categories.

She has worked as a researcher with public health and health policy projects examining urban women’s experiences with assisted reproduction, social inequality and access to medicinal substances among Adivasi communities in central India, and the role of unqualified medical practitioners in rural healthcare. As an associate researcher at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, Jaya studied how technologies and practices of digital health re-configured forms of medical and psychological expertise.

For her PhD, Jaya explores how non-cancer chronic pain is constituted as a diagnostic and therapeutic category in biomedicine amidst conditions of epistemic and ontological uncertainty. To this end, she documents the translational, ethical and relational thinking as well as labor undertaken by medical experts in collaboration with their patients.

During the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowship, Jaya is affiliated to the Department of Sociology at Boston University, working with Prof. Jane Pryma. She is expanding her research on the varying strains of expertise mobilized around chronic pain, and the medicalization of pain in India and the U.S.

Chinmaya Panda

Mr. Chinmaya Panda is a PhD candidate and a Prime Minister’s Research Fellow at the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam. His doctoral research focuses on using surfactants, surfactant-derived small peptides, and plant extracts as bioexcipients to reduce insulin aggregation. He utilizes various biophysical and biochemical techniques, alongside in silico simulations and in vitro cell culture assays, to assess the bioexcipient-mediated insulin aggregation inhibition.

Chinmaya holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from the National Institute of Technology Patna and a master’s degree in biological engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat. During his master’s, he was awarded a DAAD fellowship to investigate the impact of Alzheimer’s tau-PHF6 peptide aggregates on inflammasome and autophagy assembly at RWTH Aachen, Germany.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at Iowa State University, Chinmaya is exploring the use of natural lipopeptide-derived peptide moieties to reduce the physicochemical parameters-induced aggregation propensity of insulin. His research employs solid-phase peptide synthesis together with other characterization techniques, emphasizing the development of novel bioderived excipients to enhance the stability and effectiveness of insulin formulation, with the goal of benefiting the pharmaceutical industry and the millions of diabetes patients worldwide. Chinmay enjoys trekking and cycling along trails that delve into the dialectology, heritage, culture, and local cuisine of different regions.

Arup Biswas

Mr. Arup Biswas is a PhD candidate in Theoretical Physics at The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, Tamil Nadu. His broad research interest lies in the study of non-equilibrium statistical physics and stochastic processes. Here, his primary focus is to quantify and understand a class of complex physical processes such as animal navigation, random search processes, and transport properties and find a universal picture to describe them through a single thread.

Arup holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in physics from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal. There he was a recipient of the INSPIRE scholarship. Thereafter, he qualified in several national-level examinations such as NET JRF, GATE and JEST to avail a fellowship in PhD.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at Harvard University, Arup is working on experimental studies of dung beetles through programmable robots. Dung beetles are fascinating creatures that can use references as far off as the Milky Way galaxy to navigate towards home. His research in the US consists of understanding their motion through theoretical modelling, tabletop experiments and leveraging them for further real-life applications. Apart from academics Arup loves sketching, using cool digital tools and is interested in world politics, stock markets and cricket.

Arpan Pal

Mr. Arpan Pal is a PhD candidate at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics – Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (NCRA-TIFR), Pune, Maharashtra. His doctoral research focuses on studying the interaction of merger shocks with the intra-cluster medium in galaxy clusters. He uses a technique called radio interferometry which combines data from different radio antennas to form a large and sensitive radio telescope to study these objects in detail. His research also focuses on optimizing radio interferometry techniques to get a much clearer and sharper picture of the universe.

Arpan holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Burdwan Raj College, Burdwan and a master’s degree in physics from NCRA-TIFR. He collaborates actively with many national and international research groups and played an important role of projects that use both ground and space-based telescopes ranging from radio to X-rays.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at the National Radio Astronomical Observatory, Socorro, Arpan is exploring how several biases affect radio polarimetric imaging and, in turn, the conclusions in general. This is possibly the first attempt to characterize the radio polarimetric biases in the wide-band era of radio interferometry. He is part of the Algorithms Research and Development Group at NRAO. Arpan loves fishing, cooking and exploring new fishing spots and recipes.

Ankit Banik

Mr. Ankit Banik is a PhD candidate at the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Maharashtra. His doctoral research focuses on the development of novel and efficacious chimeric antigen receptor natural killer (CAR-NK) cell therapies, where he aims to harness the power of natural killer cells, a crucial component of the innate immune system, to target and eliminate cancer cells more effectively. His work aims to optimize the engineering of NK cells, enhancing their tumor-targeting capabilities and improving their overall therapeutic potential. His research strives to pave the way for innovative, personalized, and safer cancer treatments by advancing CAR-NK cell therapies.

Ankit completed his BSc in microbiology at University of Kalyani, acquiring a strong foundation in molecular biology, immunology, and cellular biology. Pursuing MSc in biotechnology at Pondicherry University, he honed his expertise in advanced laboratory techniques, genetic engineering, and cellular manipulation. Then as a project intern, he gained valuable research experience at the renowned Bose Institute.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ankit is exploring the potential of CAR-NK cell therapy that is more effective in targeting and treating solid tumors, overcoming the challenges posed by the tumor microenvironment and improving the therapeutic outcomes for patients. Ankit is committed to translating his findings into clinical applications that will benefit patients, and passionate about bridging the gap between laboratory research and real-world cancer therapies.

Ankit loves travelling and enjoys trekking and hiking. He has a strong appreciation of music and dance as well.