Fulbright-Nehru Grant Category India: Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowships (Research and Teaching)

Rinni Singh

Dr. Rinni Singh is a Scientific Officer at Uttar Pradesh Council of Agricultural Research, Lucknow, with over a decade of experience spanning research, policy integration, and institutional management. She plays a pivotal role in advancing sustainable agriculture through the coordination of high-impact initiatives, including the Uttar Pradesh Millet Revival Program and international R&D collaborations with organizations such as ICRISAT, Hyderabad.

As Nodal Officer for UPCAR-SEED Incubation Centre, Dr. Singh leads the development of a vibrant agri-startup ecosystem in the state. She has spearheaded over 200 outreach-capacity-building events and serves as a core mentor to agri-tech startups and incubator communities. Her expertise in innovation management is underpinned by advanced training from SINE IIT Bombay, Venture Center Pune, and Nexus Startup Hub at American Center, New Delhi. Her insights on strengthening incubation models were featured in U.S. Embassy’s SPAN Magazine, reflecting her growing influence in this space.

Dr. Singh additionally serves as Member Secretary on Board of Directors of the ANDUAT Incubation Centre, Ayodhya, and contributes to a diverse portfolio of projects ranging from skill development under PMKVY 4.0 to climate-resilient crop variety research.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Singh is aiming to develop a comparative biotech incubation framework that bridges India’s frugal, mission-driven innovation with United States’ advanced university-led institutional innovation ecosystems. She aims to co-design a leadership curriculum and a bilateral incubation toolkit to equip the next generation of agri-entrepreneurs with skills and networks needed to drive transformative change.

Richa Patanjali Mishra

Dr Richa Patanjali Mishra is the Founding Chair and Head, Humanities and Social Sciences at the Institute of Technology, Nirma University. She leads an interdisciplinary department serving engineering students across all programs with the firm belief that the humanities are not optional in STEM institutions but essential to shaping reflective, ethical, and socially responsible engineers. A scholar of the teaching-learning process and digital humanities, Dr. Mishra explores how human-centered STEM education can cultivate critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and interdisciplinary learning within engineering education. Her research develops diagnostic instruments, reflective learning frameworks, and curricular models that examine how these capacities can be systematically embedded and assessed within engineering education.

Dr. Mishra is the John Sayers Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, and has trained at Oxford, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University. As a Shastri Indo-Canadian Visiting Scholar, she researched higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) in engineering classrooms, work that has anchored her sustained scholarship on critical thinking pedagogy. A prolific published author, she conceptualized India’s first digital humanities minor course for engineering students, authored the book Introduction to Critical Thinking, and is Principal Investigator of projects funded by agencies including ICSSR.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Mishra is co-designing and validating interdisciplinary STEM-humanities curricular frameworks within the computer science capstone sequence. Upon her return, she will establish a STEM-Humanities Curriculum Innovation Lab and launch a MOOC, Technology, Ethics, and Society, translating evidence-based models for human-centered engineering education aligned with India’s NEP 2020 and U.S. priorities for accountable science.

Rekha Biswal

Dr. Rekha Biswal is Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER), Bhubaneswar. Her research focuses on representation theory, algebraic combinatorics, and Lie theory, with particular emphasis on Kac-Moody algebras, crystal bases, and quantum groups. Her work explores the combinatorial and algebraic structures underlying representations of infinite-dimensional Lie algebras, tensor product decompositions, and symmetric functions. Through the development of new crystal-theoretic and combinatorial techniques, she has contributed to several fundamental problems in representation theory and its connections with algebraic combinatorics.

Dr. Biswal received her integrated PhD in Mathematics from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. She subsequently held postdoctoral positions at Université Laval, the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, and the University of Edinburgh before joining NISER in 2022. She has also served as Visiting Professor and Foreign Researcher at the Institut Camille Jordan, University of Jean Monnet, France. Her achievements have been recognized through several awards and fellowships, including the Odisha Young Scientist Award.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Biswal is focusing on the Schur positivity conjecture, a long-standing open problem in algebraic combinatorics. In collaboration with Professor Pavlo Pylyavskyy at the University of Minnesota, she will develop new combinatorial and crystal-theoretic methods to study tensor product multiplicities and advance understanding of symmetric functions and representation theory.

Nagarajan Ganapathy

Dr. Nagarajan Ganapathy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH), India, where he heads the Medical Informatics and Digital Health Laboratory. He earned his PhD in Biomedical Engineering in 2019 at IIT Madras, India, and was a DAAD fellow at TU Braunschweig, Germany, followed by postdoctoral training at the Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics (PLRI), TU Braunschweig and Hannover Medical School, Germany. He continues to serve as a Visiting Scientist at PLRI. His research expertise spans affective computing, artificial intelligence, multimodal analysis, wearables and IoMTs, mental well-being, behavioural informatics, unobtrusive sensing, and edge analytics — with a focus on intelligent, non-invasive systems for continuous mental health monitoring and emotion recognition. He is a recipient of the DAAD Research Fellowship and DAAD Research Ambassador Award and serves as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Ganapathy is collaborating with Professor Rosalind Picard at the MIT Media Lab. He is combining his expertise in multimodal physiological AI with Professor Picard’s pioneering work in affective computing and mental health sensing to develop transformative non-invasive mental health monitoring systems and strengthen the India-United States research partnership.

Lakshmi Priya Daniel

Dr. Lakshmi Priya Daniel joined the Department of Fine Arts, Stella Maris College, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India in 1996 and has served as Director of SMCHRD, IQAC Coordinator, and Dean of Student Affairs. She earned her PhD in 2013 from the University of Madras with a focus on gender and Indian art. A 2018-2019 UBCHEA Fellow, she completed the ‘Leadership Development Program’ at Harvard Graduate School of Education and worked at the University of Melbourne. She is a recognized PhD guide of the University of Madras, has won best presentation awards, published widely, and served as guest faculty at institutions such as NIFT, IIT-Madras, and the Government College of Fine Arts, Chennai. Also, a practicing artist and curator, she has exhibited in group shows, including the 2021 USIEF–Ojas Art Gallery international exhibition ‘Reciprocation: American Fulbright Artists & India Connections’ in New Delhi.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Daniel is teaching and engaging students, artists, and educators in building cross-cultural connections on and off campus. Her teaching centers on research-based art practice, guiding students to create meaningful, informed eco-artworks. She will also devote her time to archival work, interviews, and surveys on ephemeral art by Black and women artists. Her research explores unseen artisanal practices, dying crafts, and sustainable materials, fostering dialogue on cultural preservation and ecological approaches to contemporary art-making.

Tanika Chakraborty

Dr. Tanika Chakraborty is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, specializing in Development Economics. Before joining IIM Calcutta, she worked at IIT Kanpur and DIW Berlin, after completing her PhD at Washington University in St. Louis. She is affiliated to IZA Bonn, CESifo Munich, and the Global Labor Organization.

Dr. Chakraborty’s research primarily focuses on informing policies that address human capital inequality. Her work has been featured in the Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Demography, and the Journal of Comparative Economics, among others. In addition to publishing in academic journals, she writes for print media and policy platforms such as VoxDev, Project Syndicate, and Ideas for India to reach out to a wider policy audience. She has also partnered extensively with various government bodies in India and served as an expert on the Minimum Wage committee of the Government of India.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence (Research and Teaching) Fellowship at City College, City University of New York, Dr. Chakraborty is expanding on her ongoing research, exploring effective ways of reducing inequalities in health, a key component of human capital. She is examining the widespread shift in healthcare delivery models, from direct public provision to public-private partnerships. She will engage with students to develop a course on health policy that combines perspectives from the US and India. The goal is to contribute to the global dialogue on rising healthcare costs and growing health inequalities.

Susmita Sur-Kolay

Dr. Susmita Sur-Kolay is a Visting Professor of Computer Science in Ashoka University. Till 2024, she was a Professor in the Advanced Computing and Microelectronics Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. Earlier, she was a Reader in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Jadavpur University, a post-doctoral fellow at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a Research Assistant at the Laboratory for Computer Science in Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.

Dr Sur-Kolay’s research contributions are in algorithmic design automation for electronic and quantum circuits, fault modeling and testing, hardware security, and graph algorithms. She has co-authored several papers in international journals and refereed conference proceedings, three book chapters, and co-edited three books.

She has served on the committees of international conferences and on the editorial board of major journals. She was a Distinguished Visitor of IEEE Computer Society (India), and is a Fellow of Indian National Science Academy and Indian National Academy of Engineering. She has received the President of India Gold Medal and Distinguished Alumnus Award at IIT Kharagpur, Women in Technology Leadership Award from VLSI Society of India and International Excellence Fellowship at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (2024).

During her tenure of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic Excellence Fellowship at UC San Diego, Dr. Sur-Kolay is aiming to design efficient methods for the layout phase of mapping quantum algorithms to the target quantum hardware with error correction capabilities and to teach related courses.

Sonal

Dr. Sonal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Motilal Nehru College, University of Delhi, where she teaches the history of colonial India and different dimensions of Indian and world history. She has previously taught at various undergraduate colleges of Delhi University, including Ramjas, Lady Shri Ram, Kamala Nehru, and Shivaji College.

A former Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow and Visiting Fellow at Yale Centre for British Art, Dr Sonal’s research interests focus on material and visual culture during East India Company rule in India. Her doctoral research Textures of Exchange: The Maratha States, the Mughals, and the English East India Company examined material culture in diplomacy between Indian rulers and the Company (mid-18th to mid-19th century). Currently, she is exploring colonial India’s visual cultures.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellow (Research and Teaching), Dr Sonal is investigating the satirical artworks published in the then-contemporary periodicals and newspapers that resonated with the sensibilities of the middle-class readership. She aims to unravel how caricatures reflected the socio-political commentary, serving as a medium for voices to critique the East India Company and British colonialism. In addition to her research, Dr. Sonal will teach visual cultures of colonial India and a survey course on Indian art.