Other Fulbright Grants India: Fulbright-Kalam Postdoctoral Research Fellowships

Anjana Thampi

Dr. Anjana Thampi is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Jindal Global Law School, O. P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana. She received her BA (Hons.) from the University of Delhi in 2009, and MA from the University of Hyderabad in 2011. She completed her MPhil in 2014 and PhD in 2019 from the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, under the supervision of Prof. Jayati Ghosh. Her doctoral thesis explored the impact of two food provisioning programmes on child nutrition and inequality in India. She was awarded the UGC Junior Research Fellowship in 2013.

Her areas of research include food security and nutrition, climate and sustainability, inequality, gender, and labour. She has published journal articles and book chapters and contributes opinion pieces on contemporary issues. She has also presented her work at national and international workshops and conferences.

Dr. Thampi’s postdoctoral project, supported by the Fulbright-Kalam fellowship, would assess the potential of a strengthened employment guarantee programme to address the climate and livelihoods crises in India. The study would estimate the green jobs created through a universal employment guarantee in India, its budgetary requirement, and suggest ways to finance it. The global Green New Deal, green job guarantee proposals in the United States, and international experiences of job guarantee would be compared with the experiences of the rural job guarantee in India. This project would have policy implications for India and the global project to address the climate crisis.

Gopal Murali

Dr. Gopal Murali’s research interest spans many areas in ecology and evolution pertaining to biological diversity at various scales and organizations. He obtained his PhD in 2020 from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. His doctoral research focused on understanding the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms underlying defensive animal colourations and has published several research articles in reputed, peer-reviewed international journals. After his PhD, Dr. Murali was awarded the PBC postdoctoral fellowship for outstanding Chinese and Indian postdoctoral fellows by the Council for Higher Education, Israel (2020). His current work at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, applies macroecological and macroevolutionary perspectives to characterize processes that underlie various broad-scale biodiversity patterns, and to predict how biodiversity will shift in response to recent environmental change.

Climate change poses a major threat to biodiversity, and there is an urgent need to forecast the effects of climate change on species persistence to inform conservation. During his Fulbright-Nehru postdoctoral research fellowship, in collaboration with Prof. John J. Wiens, Dr. Murali aims to utilize data from recent species’ responses to climate change to incorporate the adaptive capacity of species in climate change vulnerability assessments.

Arpita Dalal

Dr. Arpita Dalal obtained her B.Sc degree from Birjhora Mahavidyalaya, Gauhati University, in 2010 and her master’s degree from the Department of Ecology and Environmental Science, Assam University, in 2012. She then received her PhD in 2020 under the supervision of Prof. Susmita Gupta at Assam University-. Her research work focuses on biomonitoring and ecology of freshwater ecosystems using aquatic insects and use of predatory macroinvertebrates (such as aquatic insects and crustaceans) as biocontrol agents of mosquito populations. Dr. Dalal has published several research articles in reputable international and national journals. She was awarded the DST-INSPIRE Fellowship (2013) and has qualified in the CBSE-UGC NET examination (2014). Her other scientific recognitions include JSPS HOPE Fellow awarded at 8th HOPE Meeting with Nobel Laureates, Japan (2016); selection for Newton-Bhabha PhD placement programme, hosted by Queen’s University, UK for six months, sponsored by British Council, UK and DBT, India (2016). She was also selected from India to participate in the BRICS Young Scientist Forum Conclave, Russia (2020).

Aedes aegypti mosquito is a carrier of deadly diseases worldwide include dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya. Recently, they invaded the Great Plains of USA, expanding their range. Factors of their invasion and expansion must be identified to prevent further expansion. To address this issue in her postdoctoral stint supported by the Fulbright-Kalam fellowship, Dr. Dalal is designing feeding experiments under different climatic and abiotic factors coupled with field works to identify the reasons behind the A. aegypti invasion and sustenance in a new area.

Manashita Borah

Dr. Manashita Borah, is as an Assistant Professor (Senior Grade) in the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE), Tezpur University, Assam, India since 2016. She obtained her PhD from Department of EE, NIT Silchar. Dr Borah is the recipient of the Young Scientist Award, conferred by DST, Government of Assam in the State Awards Ceremony for Scientific Excellence in 2019, the Young Engineer’s Award by Senior Engineers Forum, Institution of Engineers in 2018 and two IEEE best paper awards. Additionally, she also received the Distinguished Anundoram Borooah Merit Award from the Government of Assam and Oil India Limited.

Dr Borah leads the Control System Design and Simulation Laboratory in the Department of EE at Tezpur University, where her research group is focusing on designing fractional-order controllers, IoT enabled renewable energy systems, among others.

Her Fulbright-Kalam project aims to address two open problems faced globally: shortcomings of existing energy infrastructure and climate sustainable energy storage by capitalizing on green energy sources. She will be working on designing a smart hybrid storage system to deliver an improved, sustainable, resilient, safe, and efficient green energy storage infrastructure. It will address the serious implications of climate change faced in her home state of Assam, such as heavy floods due to the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, soil erosion and landslides that cause power outage for several days.

Apart from being conferred with prestigious awards and having publications in reputed journals, she has been actively associated with various departmental, academic and co-curricular activities of the university, such as dance, drama, and yoga. She has been trained in the Indian classical dance forms of Bharatnatyam and Shattriya for twelve years.