Fulbright-Nehru Grant Category India: Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowships

Akshay U Nair

Mr. Akshay U Nair is a Ph.D. scholar at the Department of Biology, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Tirupati. The major interest of research is understanding the molecular mechanisms underpinning the plant acquired stress response(s). He is trying to correlate the key transcriptional, post-transcriptional, and epigenetic pathways to get a deeper understanding of the stress memory mechanism in plants. Identifying the vital regulatory modules could aid in engineering abiotic stress-resilient crops.

He completed his master’s from the Department of Plant Science, Central University of Kerala. He has been a summer research fellow (2019) of the Indian Academy of Sciences. He has qualified for some of the national-level competitive exams including CSIR-Net, GATE, JGEEBILS.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, he will be investigating how the transgenerational inheritance of acquired stress tolerance occurs in plants. The outputs of this research will be helpful in connecting the altered gene regulatory networks with epigenetic modifications induced by specific abiotic stresses in plants.

He spends his non-research hours playing football and venturing into short stories. He is also interested in cooking and exploring new places.

Vaishali Thakkur

Ms. Vaishali Thakkur is a Ph.D. scholar at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK), Uttar Pradesh. Her research focuses on modelling enzymatic reactions using density functional based on the quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) technique. As a part of her doctoral thesis, she works with the QM/MM method, along with various enhanced sampling techniques, to study the underlying mechanism for antibiotic resistance. She is also interested in identifying and addressing the bottleneck in these calculations to make them more efficient. Apart from science, she enjoys spending her time learning new languages and playing with her color palette.

Prior to joining IITK as a research scholar, she completed her bachelor’s and master’s in Chemistry from Delhi University and Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD), respectively. She has been a recipient of the merit cum means scholarship for her performance at IITD. She also has a year-long experience of working as an online educator and content reviewer at Chegg India Pvt. Ltd.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, she will work with experts to understand and implement a new electrostatic embedding scheme in the existing QM/MM framework. The aim is to develop a model that is accurate and affordable at the same time. The introduction of such a method would be beneficial for people modelling reactions in complex biological systems, where the computation of these electrostatic interactions proves to be time consuming.

Sakshi Shukla

Ms. Sakshi Shukla is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB), Mumbai. The aim of her Ph.D. thesis is to identify a biomarker to predict Levodopa Induced Dyskinesia (LID) in Parkinson’s disease patients based on multimodal neuroimaging, clinical and behavioral characteristics. She is one of the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN) Global Scholars selected in 2022 to participate in the online MRI graduate program and clinical neuroimaging course at Oxford University, UK.

Ms. Shukla has completed her bachelor’s degree in zoology (H) from Daulat Ram College, University of Delhi. Later, she pursued her master’s in medical biotechnology and graduated as a gold medalist from Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak. She has qualified exams such as CSIR-UGC NET JRF, GATE, BET, CEEB, IIT-JAM. Beyond academics, she loves to interact with people and acquire new skills. She is an outdoor enthusiast and loves to travel to natural places.

During the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship tenure, Ms. Shukla is learning newer techniques in medical imaging for movement disorders, such as Neuromelanin MRI, and NODDI (neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging). She intends to draw meaningful inferences from the collected data with the help of a clinical neuroimaging expert.

Ria Sen Gupta

Ms. Ria Sen Gupta is a Ph.D. candidate and a Prime Minister’s Research Fellow at the Department of Materials Engineering, IISc Bangalore. She is advised by Prof. Suryasarathi Bose. Her research interests span all aspects of structure-property relationships in polymer nanocomposites. A general theme underlying her current research projects is the engineering of bioinspired membranes for water remediation from interpenetrating polymeric networks (IPNs). She is also broadly interested in water remediation, polymer nanocomposites, and EMI shielding materials. Her research has appeared in several reputed international journals. She has also delivered talks and presentations at various national and international conferences, workshops, and forums.

Before joining IISc, Ms. Sen Gupta completed her M.Tech. and post-B.Sc three-year B.Tech. in polymer science and technology at the University of Calcutta, and her B.Sc. (Hons.) in chemistry at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata. In her free time, she loves singing, cooking, reading books, painting, and watching movies.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Sen Gupta is exploring antifouling MXene composite membranes with photocatalytic self-cleaning abilities for synergistically enhanced water treatment. In particular, she is leveraging “photocatalysis” and “membrane separation” technologies to design and fabricate broad-spectrum multifunctional membranes with improved antifouling attributes and superior membrane performance. She is synthesizing composite membranes endowed with self-cleaning and antifouling features using photocatalytic two-dimensional (2D) etched metal carbides (MXene) heterostructures. She aims to ensure that the membranes can liquidate the inhomogeneity and impaired compatibility between photocatalytic nanoparticles and the 2D heterostructures membrane-based separation layer for cost-effective membrane performance and improved shelf-life.

Saumya

Ms. Saumya is a doctoral candidate at the National Law University, Delhi. Her interest lies in socio-legal research that examines the intricacies of people’s, especially women’s, engagement with the law in the context of their familial, social, and economic locations. She holds a master’s degree in constitutional law from the Indian Law Institute, New Delhi, where she graduated top of her class. Saumya’s work has appeared in various national and international journals and edited books, including Lexis Nexis and Routledge publications.

Ms. Saumya actively engages with research and awareness work on human rights and women and the law. In 2020, she was a visiting researcher at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, to work as a part of the Indian Ministry of Education’s SPARC Project on Law, Gender, and Sustainable Development. She has also served as a resource person for lectures on women and legal rights at the University of Udaipur’s UGC Centre for Women Studies. Having worked as a lawyer in the past, she had the opportunity to observe gender-based power relationships in society up close through cases involving constitutional rights, domestic violence, and labor law violations.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Saumya is examining how the low-waged women’s education, personal and socio-economic circumstances, and future goals influence the way they deal with problems at work, and when and how they choose to utilize the legal remedies available to them to raise their voice. The study will not only help her in her doctoral work, but also contribute to a deeper understanding of the role of gender in employment relations and improve the legal response to the needs and work-life experiences of low-waged women in India.

Devidutta Samantaray

Ms. Devidutta Samantaray is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Biology, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Tirupati. She is working towards unveiling the epigenetic regulation of heat stress response and establishment of plant stress memory. Identification of principal regulators of plant stress response will pave a path towards the development of a feasible system for epigenetic breeding for crop improvement programs.

Ms. Samantaray holds a bachelor’s degree in botany from Nimapara Autonomous College, Puri, Odisha, and a master’s degree in botany from Utkal University, Odisha. She was awarded the Institute of Mathematics and Application scholarship by the Government of Odisha to pursue post-graduation studies in science, mathematics and biotechnology. She has qualified national level competitive exams including Joint CSIR-UGC JRF-NET, ICAR-NET and GATE.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Samantaray is identifying and elucidating the role(s) of small RNAs in regulating transgenerational stress-adaptive phenotypic plasticity in Arabidopsis thaliana. She hopes to be a scientific researcher in the field of plant epigenetics.

Fathima Rayammarakkar Fasal

Ms. Fathima Rayammarakkar Fasal is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai. Her doctoral research focuses on urban spaces, migrant communities, and land transformation in Bengaluru. She is researching urban local markets to understand how ethno-religious migrant communities co-produce spaces significant for local businesses in the city and negotiate with the dynamics of land transformation politics. Ms. Fasal has presented her research at various international conferences, including a presentation on urban aestheticization politics and land claims of a fishing community in Chennai at the European Sociological Association’s Urban Sociology Conference in Berlin and another on “Southern Urbanism as a Non-western Methodology for Urban Research” at the Ireland-India Institute’s South Asia conference.

Ms. Fasal has an interdisciplinary background with an M.A. in women’s studies and B.A. in social sciences from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and Hyderabad respectively. This interdisciplinary training reflects the choice and methodology of her ongoing research, which combines concepts from multiple disciplines such as sociology, urban studies, human geography and social history. Ms. Fasal has obtained Junior Research Fellowship (2018) in women’s studies and cleared UGC NET (2022) in sociology. She also worked as a research assistant on a UNICEF project at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. Besides academics, Ms. Fasal enjoys cooking, cinema and traveling.

During her Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Fasal is striving to valorize the heterogeneity of experiences and knowledge about Global South cities and is conducting comparative research on migrant economies and urbanisms.

Amritha Radhakrishnan

Ms. Amritha Radhakrishnan is a Ph.D. candidate and Teaching Assistant at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand. The larger fields within which her doctoral research is embedded are medical humanities, gender studies, memory studies and visual studies. Drawing theoretical frameworks from these fields, she studies the entailment of traumatic memories of illnesses in graphic narratives using the unique formal properties of the comic medium and the disentanglement of represented memory by readers.

Ms. Radhakrishnan is a recipient of the JRF fellowship awarded by the University Grants Commission (UGC), Government of India for doctoral research and is currently a Senior Research Fellow (SRF). She holds a master’s degree in English literature from Sacred Heart College, Kerala and a bachelor’s in English literature and communication studies (double major) from St. Xavier’s College, Kerala, where she was a university rank holder. She has presented papers at numerous national and international conferences, including “The Child of the Future” Conference hosted by the University of Cambridge, where she also mediated a session. Ms. Radhakrishnan has been a resource person for a talk series organized by the Sacred Heart College, where she spoke on the various possibilities of graphic medicine as a field. She has co-authored an article on the functions of graphic illness narratives, published by the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Taylor & Francis (2022). Her forthcoming book chapter on representations of chronic pain in the graphic medium will be published in a volume called Keywords/Images in Graphic Medicine. Apart from her research, she devotes her time to travel and cinema. She is a trained Carnatic classical singer and can speak five languages. She is passionate about learning new languages and understanding different cultures.

Ms. Radhakrishnan’s doctoral dissertation focuses on the emergence of graphic medicine, its production and consumption, with particular emphasis on the socio-political role of personal illness narratives in the advocacy for rights and in developing health literacy. As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, she is furthering her research by gaining access to cartoon museums and libraries and by engaging in conversations with inter-disciplinary scholars in the fields pertaining to her doctoral research.

Kiranmoy Patra

Mr. Kiranmoy Patra is a Ph.D. student at the Division of Agronomy, ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi. His research interests include conservation agriculture (CA), nutrient and water management, and resource use optimization at the farm level. His current research focuses on application of dynamic crop simulation modeling to identify the drivers of long-term CA effect on nitrogen management in cereal systems, with a specific emphasis on maize-wheat.

Mr. Patra went to Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya (BCKV), West Bengal for his bachelor’s in agricultural science in 2018 and then attended the post-graduate school, ICAR-IARI for his M.Sc. in agronomy in 2020. During his master’s, he worked on subsurface drip fertigation in a conservation agriculture-based maize system and published his findings in prestigious journals. His master’s thesis was awarded the Best PG Thesis Award by Maize Technologists’ Association of India (MTAI), New Delhi. He has also received top rankings in several national level examinations, including AIR-7 in ICAR-AIEEA for PG (2018), AIR-1 in ICAR-AICE-JRF/SRF for PhD (2020), ASRB-NET, BHU-PET etc.

In addition to his academic pursuits, Mr. Patra enjoys cooking, reading novels and self-help books, watching movies, and traveling to new places. He is also an avid gardener with knowledge and hands-on experience in garden maintenance, nursery management, grafting, and mushroom production.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Mr. Patra is working with leading mentors in dynamic crop simulation modeling to further enhance his knowledge of nitrogen dynamics and management under long-term CA based systems. He aims to familiarize himself with the state-of-the-art technologies and tools of the crop growth model DSSAT, and to apply it to a long-term CA dataset acquired and maintained in India through field experiments. This research has potential to open up new avenues for redesigning nitrogen management protocols in CA-based cropping systems.

Aasiya Nabi

Ms. Aasiya Nabi is a Ph.D. candidate at Sher-e- Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir, Srinagar. Using technologies like Crispr-cas9 to target pathogen effector genes and Transcriptomics, her doctoral thesis focuses on understanding how pathogens modulate the host functions during pathogenesis. She has publications in well reputed journals,and has participated and presented papers and abstracts at national and international conferences and webinars.

Ms. Nabi holds a bachelor’s degree in horticulture, and a master’s degree in plant pathology from SKUAST-Kashmir. She has been a meritorious student during her bachelors’ and masters’ degree. As a student of horticultural sciences, she likes to participate in farmer awareness programs. She is also a nature photographer who likes spending time in nature. She enjoys traveling and interacting with people from different cultures.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Nabi is exploring the Crispr-cas9, a genome editing tool, to delineate pathogenesis mechanism of plant pathogens. She is primarily working on understanding the host-pathogen interaction to devise viable and eco-friendly disease management strategies.