Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research - Flex) Archives

Shrikant R. Bharadwaj

Dr. Shrikant Bharadwaj trained as a vision scientist at the School of Optometry, University of California, Berkeley, and the Indiana University School of Optometry. As a DBT Ramalingaswami fellow in 2009, he established the Visual Optics and Psychophysics Laboratory at the L V Prasad Eye Institute (LVPEI) with the agenda to understand how the optics of the eye influences human visual perception. Dr. Bharadwaj uses a combination of experimental, behavioral, and computational techniques to address this research agenda.

Dr. Bharadwaj actively publishes his research work in international vision science journals, and serves on the editorial board of Nature’s Scientific Reports, Optometry and Vision Science, PLOS One (Public Library of Science) and the Indian Journal of Ophthalmology. He also served as a committee member on the WHO development group for refractive error interventions and was awarded the Jaggi Optometrist of the year award in 2021 by the Optometry Council of India.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Bharadwaj is working to understand visual perception in patients with an eye disease called Keratoconus. This disease distorts the eye’s cornea, causing profound loss of vision and quality of life in the patients. Through his research, Dr. Bharadwaj aspires to develop a comprehensive psychophysical assessment of visual functions in this disease, to dissect the roles of optics and neurology in vision loss using adaptive optics, and to optimize patient’s vision through personalized contact lens designs and perceptual vision training.

Malvika Maheshwari

Dr. Malvika Maheshwari is Associate Professor of Political Science at Ashoka University. She holds degrees in the discipline from Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and she completed her doctorate from Sciences Po, Paris, in 2011. Prior to joining Ashoka, she taught South Asian politics at Sciences Po, Paris and Le Havre, and was a research associate at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Dr. Maheshwari’s research lies at the intersection of political thought and art practice, especially as it relates to phenomena like violence, power, democracy, and state capacity. Her first book, Art Attacks: Violence and Offence-taking India, was published in 2019 (Oxford University Press) and her research articles have been published in reputed journals, such as India Review, Raisons Politiques, Studies in Indian Politics, Economic and Political Weekly and The Arts Politic. She is a recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust (University of Cambridge) and the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund fellowships, among others.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence schloar, Dr. Maheshwari would be working on her second book project on the ‘National Akademies of Art and the Politics of Administering Aesthetics in Postcolonial India.’ In this project, she seeks to understand the political and intellectual origins, and the trajectory of the Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA) for dance, music and theatre, Lalit Kala Akademi (LKA) for fine arts, and Sahitya Akademi (SA) for literature, established in mid-1950s. The research focuses on the institution’s history, its core principles, and internal contestations, and how its language, functioning and the ideological discourse supported interests of various state and central government policies, as much as shaping the complexities of the art world, and through it, ideas of citizenship and the public. Following a basic question–what did the Indian statesmen, particularly during the early years of India’s independence, want to do with the arts? –this work explores a critical sphere of state activity where art and politics coexist, compete but also in the process constitute one another, that is, in its role as an allocator: of resources, awards, buildings, legitimacy, among other things.

Divay Gupta

Mr. Divay Gupta is a leading Heritage Conservation and Management expert with more than twenty-five years of professional and academic experience. An Alumni of ICCROM, University of Birmingham, and School of Planning and Architecture, he has been part of several prestigious projects in UK, USA, India, Afghanistan, Nepal and Cambodia. He has led several heritage projects and initiatives at building and urban level at INTACH, New Delhi. His restoration projects in Ladakh have won the South Asian UNESCO awards of Merit and Excellence. He is a member of the UNESCO International Conservation Committee on Preah Vihear, Government of Cambodia and has served as an expert member on National Culture Fund and Advisory committee on World Heritage matters to ASI, Government of India. He was also a visiting faculty and a member on the board of studies of the Department of Architecture Conservation at SPA, New Delhi. He has several publications on conservation and has been invited to keynote lectures at various national and international conferences. Based on his diverse expertise, he provides thought leadership in using cultural lead value-based integrated approach in heritage conservation by developing sustainable models in tourism, urban development and economic regeneration to create cultural assets and vibrant historic cities.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Gupta is developing his argument of positioning historic cities as ‘smart cities’, looking beyond concepts of ICT, where reviving and harnessing the unique heritage assets of these cities helps in achieving the SDGs, making them vibrant ‘smarter cities’.

Anupama Ghosh

Dr. Anupama Ghosh is Associate Professor in the Division of Plant Biology, Bose Institute, Kolkata. Her primary research interests include virulence mechanisms of different phytopathogens and defense responses from the respective host plants. Her research group at Bose Institute is engaged in understanding the role of various molecular players from a biotrophic plant pathogenic fungus, Ustilago maydis, which are involved in the invasion and colonization of the host plant Zea mays.

Dr. Ghosh earned her bachelor’s in microbiology, and master’s and Ph.D. in biotechnology from the University of Calcutta. For her postdoctoral studies, she joined the Department of Organismic Interactions, Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, Marburg, Germany, where she contributed significantly to studies involving functional characterization of secreted effector proteins from Ustilago maydis. She received the DST-INSPIRE Faculty Award from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India and the Early Career Research Award from Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Government of India for carrying out her research in plant-microbe interactions. Ongoing research projects at her laboratory are funded by Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Government of India and SERB.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Ghosh is studying the role of extracellular vesicles in Zea mays in the defense response of maize towards Ustilago maydis infection.

Ranabir Das

Dr. Ranabir Das is Associate Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. He has worked extensively on the mechanisms used by viruses and bacteria to hijack the human cell signaling pathways and shut off the host’s immune response. Dr. Das’ laboratory has shown how the family of Herpes simplex viruses uses human proteins to transcribe the viral DNA and produce viral proteins. His lab showed how the proteins from Shigella shut down the immune response in a human and replicated efficiently. These studies have provided novel insights into how pathogens survive inside the host and have helped identify new therapeutic targets for drug discovery.

Dr. Das has published 23 papers in the last five years in several journals, like Nature Communications, the Journal of American Chemical Society, eLife, ChemComm among others. Multiple grant agencies have generously funded his research work. Dr. Das has received the prestigious Prof. S. Subramanian 60th Birthday Lecture Award, the Ramalingaswami Re-entry Fellowship and the NCI Director’s Innovation Award among several others. He has been a member of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Biophysical Society, and the NMR Society of India.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Das is working to understand how the pathogenic bacteria Shigella silences the inflammatory response in the intestinal cells to multiply effectively. This work may help identify new therapeutic targets to counter multi-drug resistant Shigella infection.