Fulbright-Nehru Grant Category India: Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research & Teaching)

Kanchan K. Malik

Dr. Kanchan K. Malik is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Hyderabad, India, where she also served as Head from 2017-20. She has been a Faculty Fellow with UNESCO Chair on Community Media since 2011 and Editor of the e-newsletter, CR News. With a dual Master’s in Economics and Mass Communication, Dr. Malik worked as a journalist with The Economic Times, New Delhi, before kindling her career in academics. Dr. Malik’s teaching and research are in the areas of community media, women in community communications, journalism studies, and media ethics. She has worked with national and international research projects and published papers on media interventions by non-governmental organizations for empowerment at the grassroots level.

Dr. Malik co-authored with Prof. Vinod Pavarala the much-cited book ‘Other Voices: The Struggle for Community Radio in India’ (Sage: 2007). Her co-edited book is ‘Community Radio in South Asia: Reclaiming the Airwaves’ (Routledge: 2020). She recently worked on the manual ‘Strengthening Gender Sensitive Practices and Programming in Community Radio’ (UNESCO, 2021).

Dr. Malik’s Fulbright-Nehru teaching component will comprise thematic seminars focusing on how community media in South Asia have enabled women to create gender spaces, challenge women’s marginalization in access to media and help mainstream gender in social change discourses. Her research project will seek to develop a framework for interpreting the empowerment question through the culturally rooted lived realities of women engaged in community communication and untangling how women negotiate with and navigate the deep-rooted issues affecting gender equality.

Anu Unny

Dr. Anu Unny is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Kerala. She is also the Hon. Director of UGC-Nehru Studies Centre, University of Kerala. Before joining the University of Kerala, she worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Delhi. She has served as a Member of the Board of Studies in Kerala and Kannur Universities.

Dr. Unny completed her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from the School of International Studies (SIS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. Along with her teaching responsibilities, she acts as a research guide for the Ph.D. Programme in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Kerala. She is a recipient of the International Studies Association (ISA) grant to visit the US in 2017. She has many research papers to her credit in national and international journals. She has visited many countries, including the US, to present her research outcomes in conferences. She is an active participant in media discussions on international issues and a resource person for UGC Orientation and Refresher Programmes.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Dr. Unny will teach a course on the ‘Politics of Climate Change’ for students at the University of Washington. She will also engage in research at the University of Washington to understand the nuances of US domestic politics on climate change and to explore the challenges and possibilities in strengthening India-US climate cooperation. Apart from climate politics, Dr. Unny’s research interests lie in gender, human rights and Indian politics.

Sarita Sundar

Ms. Sarita Sundar’s practice and research spans heritage studies, visual culture, and design theory. She is the founder of Hanno, a heritage interpretation and design consultancy.

Ms. Sundar has a postgraduate degree in Visual Communications from the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad and an M.A. in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester, UK where she was awarded the 2016 Professor Eilean Hooper-Greenhill Academic Prize. She is a visiting faculty at various design institutes: including NID, Ahmedabad; and Srishti Manipal School of Design and Technology, Bangalore. Her research ranges from studies of vernacular typography to looking at the intangible and material culture of performance practices in the temples of Valuvanad, Kerala (for which she received a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts). Her present research focuses on the cultural and design history of seats in India and will culminate in a publication in 2022.

Ms. Sundar’s Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship takes forward her multi-disciplinary research and seeks to address the lacuna of critical discourse in the discipline of design in India. By mapping the transcultural exchange of aesthetics and ideologies between India and the United States, and situating the interconnected events and dialogues, Ms. Sundar’s project looks at how these historical milestones continue to motivate and influence contemporary design, and associated fields such as curatorial practice in both countries. Furthermore, it examines the pathways followed by modernism and counter-movements like postmodernism, and their interactions with indigenous epistemology in Indian aesthetics and thought. She is also co-teaching a course, ‘Visualizing India’, at the University of Vermont.

Shibayan Roy

Dr. Shibayan Roy is an Assistant Professor in the Materials Science Center of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Kharagpur, West Bengal since 2015.

Previously, Dr. Roy was a postdoctoral research associate at Materials Science and Technology Division in Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA from November 2013 to October 2015. He is the recipient of the R&D 100 award (2017) from R&D Magazine, USA as a part of the research group from ORNL.

Dr. Roy also worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Materials Science and Engineering (IWW), Department of Mechanical Engineering, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany from February 2012 to September 2013. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Materials Engineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore in November 2011. He also received the K.P. Abraham Gold Medal for Best Doctoral Thesis from IISc and the Student Innovative Thesis Award (Doctoral level) from the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) in 2012, in recognition of his doctoral thesis.

Through the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award (Research and Teaching) project, Dr. Roy aims for an in-depth characterization of coherency and orientation relationship as well as atomistic structure and remnant dislocations at α/β interfaces for different α-colony orientations after secondary TMP and additive manufacturing (AM) of two-phase Titanium alloys. His work also establishes an interrelation between these attributes of α/β interface and spheroidization response of different α-colony orientations in the course of secondary TMP and AM.

Ranjith Padinhateeri

Dr. Ranjith Padinhateeri is a professor in the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay). Dr. Padinhateeri’s lab focuses on theoretical studies to understand various biological phenomena using a variety of tools from physics, including statistical mechanics, polymer physics, and soft-matter theory. His specific areas of interest include nucleosome dynamics, chromatin assembly, DNA mechanics, and the self-assembly of proteins.

Dr. Padinhateeri completed his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, and the Institute Curie, Paris. He gained expertise in applying physics principles to understand biological systems. Dr. Padinhateeri joined the IIT Bombay faculty in 2009. He and his team developed computational models to investigate the kinetics of nucleosomes and the polymer organization of chromatin. Dr. Padinhateeri has received several awards, including the National Bioscience Award from the Department of Biotechnology India.

Dr. Padinhateeri’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to develop a model to understand chromatin organization —the organization of the genetic material— in space and time inside a cell nucleus, accounting for nucleosome dynamics. The predictions from computational studies of the model could help us to design gene regions that can have specific chromatin states. As a part of the fellowship, Dr. Padinhateeri also plans to teach a course on modeling biological processes covering stochastic processes, Monte Carlo simulations, and molecular dynamics simulations.

Rajesh Nachiappa Ganesh

Dr. Rajesh Nachiappa Ganesh is a Professor in the Department of Pathology at Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER), Puducherry. He works in the broad field of Surgical Pathology with special focus on Renal and transplant pathology, molecular pathology and image analysis. He has been actively working in the field of biomarker research in native and transplant renal diseases.

Professor Rajesh has 17 years of teaching and research experience in the field of surgical pathology after his doctoral degree and has been a faculty at JIPMER for twelve years. He had started the division of renal and transplant pathology services at JIPMER in 2010 and started post-doctoral fellowship in Nephro-pathology. He is actively involved in obtaining extra-mural funded research grants from various national and international agencies and has established a molecular research laboratory which has been expanded for diagnostic patient care with funding from Department of Health Research, India. He is also actively involved in proteomics applications and image analysis in the field of Pathology with several collaborative projects.

Professor Rajesh’s Fulbright project is intended on close interaction with senior consultants in Nephropathology at Houston Methodist Hospital, Texas, to study inter-observer reproducibility in diagnostic reporting of renal biopsies and validate the findings in Polyomavirus infections in transplant biopsies. The teaching component involves regular discussion of the biopsy and clinical findings with Nephrology residents and fellows at the center and is in synergy with the research objective to improve patient care outcomes.

Ramu Manivannan

Dr. Ramu Manivannan currently serves as Honorary Chairperson at Multiversity – Centre for Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Kurumbapalayam, Vellore, Tamil Nadu. He combines research and teaching experiments in education, development, and democracy with special interest on indigenous knowledge systems. He is a writer, public commentator and contributor to several Indian print and visual media outlets.

Dr. Manivannan served as a Professor and Head of the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Madras for sixteen years. He taught in Hindu College, Delhi University for over 18 years before joining the University of Madras. He was a fellow of the United Nations University, Tokyo, Japan. He has been working with refugees from Tibet, Burma and Sri Lanka for over three decades in the areas of peace, education and development. He has founded fifteen non-formal schools for the children from tribal areas, stone quarry areas and the weavers’ community before building an alternative school, Garden of Peace, for rural children based on holistic education, located in Kurumbapalayam in Vellore, Tamil Nadu.

Dr. Manivannan’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to undertake a comparative study on John Rawls, Amartya Sen and J. C. Kumarappa based on their works on justice and examine the implications of their ideas to the notions of democracy and development in India. Given the combination of teaching and research plan, he will also be teaching papers on democracy and development in India and South Asia, besides co-teaching a paper on the political economy of Brazil and India.

Anita M George

Dr. Anita M George is a marine biologist and sponge taxonomist at a prestigious institution in India. She is a visiting scientist at the CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Goa. Her 14 years of research is concentrated on the systematics of sponges along with their associated biota and how sponges act as ecological indicators to climate change factors. As a principal investigator in the DBT-Research Associate program, Dr. George conducted the first sponge taxonomy workshop at CSIR-NIO, Goa, in 2019 with grants from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Pune and Rajiv Gandhi Science and Technology Commission, Maharashtra.

Dr. George obtained her Ph.D. from Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tamil Nadu, where she worked on the taxonomy and biodiversity of south Indian sponges. Her post doctorate from James Cook University, Townsville, focused on the morphological changes of sponges from protected and non-protected reefs of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), Australia using remote-sensed data and Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping. Dr. George received a research and travel grant from the Australian Institute of Marine Science to research the Queensland Museum collections of calcareous sponges of GBR and Palau.

Dr. George’s Fulbright-Nehru project will explore the latitudinal gradients in sponge morphology and microbiome composition using metagenomics and environmental eDNA extracts. The research outcome will give insights into the impact of seawater temperatures on sponge metabolism and biodiversity. Dr. George will share her GIS and taxonomic knowledge with her host, where the students can work in their interdisciplinary fields of research.

Sandip Kumar Saha

Dr. Sandip Kumar Saha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. He works in the broad area of thermal energy storage, solar receivers, and cooling technologies. His primary research interest is exploring the different types of thermal energy storage for solar thermal applications. In recent years, he has been actively involved in developing and demonstrating new technologies for thermal energy storage, solar receiver, and green building.

Dr. Saha received his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. He was with R&D TATA Steel, India, as a Researcher, and Applied Mechanics and Energy Conversion, Department of Mechanical Engineering, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, as a postdoctoral fellow before joining IIT Bombay as a faculty member in 2012. Since then, he has carried out several large, funded projects in thermal energy storage. Prof. Saha is a recipient of the Bhaskara Advanced Solar Energy (BASE) Fellowship, IUSSTF, 2016. He was awarded the IIT Bombay research award 2020. He is currently serving on the editorial boards of Scientific Reports.

Dr. Saha’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to develop a new high thermal conductive solid-solid phase change material that can be stable for more than few thousands of thermal cycles for low-temperature solar applications (<80 C). A detailed investigation of the thermophysical properties using state-of-art experimental and computational facilities will be carried out to optimize the process parameters and the filler materials. Specifically, an emphasis will be given to understanding the contact between filler polymer interfaces and interfacial thermal resistance. For his teaching component, Prof. Saha is team-teaching a course on advanced engineering thermodynamics with his host. To ensure synergy between the two components, interested students from the course will be involved in analysing and thereby enhancing the performance of energy systems using thermal energy storage through the research work.

Sudarshan Kumar

Dr. Sudarshan Kumar is working as senior scientist at National Dairy Research Institute Karnal. He is presently engaged in research related to dairy animal health and production. Over the last 10 years, Dr. Kumar has developed skills in proteomics-based approaches to solve the problems of low milk yield, truncated lactation, mastitis and alternatives to antibiotics in dairy animals. He also develops highly sensitive MS-based methods for the determination of residual veterinary drugs, pesticides and adulterant in milk. He is specialized in molecular cloning, protein expression and purification in a wide range of hosts like bacteria, yeast and mammalian cell which are validated for its function in cell culture models. Recently, in recognition of his work, Dr. Kumar has been conferred the fellowship of the prestigious National Academy of Dairy Sciences.

Currently, his research activities are focused on discovering alternatives to antibiotics. Dr. Kumar’s studies revealed that urogenital tract in animal secrets a large number of endogenous peptides which possesses antimicrobial characteristics and thus keep the organ sterile. However, there are challenges in its clinical application.

The Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Scholar Program involving collaboration between NDRI and Oregon State University aims to understand the mechanism of action behind such AMPs. Specifically, the emphasis is on understanding the molecular crosstalk between antimicrobial peptide and bacterial growth during the tussle to survive and to explore the responsive mechanism of bacteria towards AMPs. In the presence of AMPs, bacterial growth is inhibited. But the final outcome of the battle depends on the potency of AMPs and the SOS response of bacteria. For taking AMPs to the clinical stage, it is essential to understand the SOS response of bacteria. Such knowledge not only helps in the selection of a best AMP but also enables devising strategies to combat antimicrobial resistance.