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

Satish Kumar

Mr. Satish Kumar is a doctoral candidate and Senior Research Fellow (UGC-JRF/NET) at Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, Maharashtra. His Ph.D. research links agricultural production with nutritional food security through agriculture diversification in the semi-arid climate. His research interests include agriculture-nutrition linkages, food and nutrition security, sustainable agriculture, and policy process and policy design in Indian agriculture.

Before joining IIT Bombay for his M. Phil., Mr. Kumar earned his bachelor’s and master’s in geography from Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi respectively. For his M. Phil. dissertation, he developed a land use vulnerability index (LUVI) for the Mumbai metropolitan region to suggest sustainable land use planning using empirical evidence.

Mr. Kumar has presented his work at many international conferences. In addition, he represented India in the NTU-STEP scholar program at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and assisted the TIGR2ESS project in India, which is a research collaboration of Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and the University of Cambridge. He has delivered several lectures on agriculture sustainability and urban agriculture. He is also a university rank holder in the undergraduate program and represented the University of Delhi at several state-level table tennis tournaments.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Mr. Kumar is developing econometric models identifying the agriculture production and nutrition relationship in a geographical setting. He believes that his research will enable agriculture-dependent small and marginal farmers to achieve nutritional and food security through agricultural diversification.

Neha Kaushal

Ms. Neha Kaushal is a Ph.D. candidate at the Material Science and Sensor Application department of CSIR-Central Scientific Instruments Organisation (CSIO), Chandigarh. Her doctoral research primarily focuses on the design and characterization of nanocarbon based heterojunctions for the photocatalytic degradation of endocrine disrupting chemicals in water. She is an awardee of the prestigious DST-Inspire Fellowship since 2019.

Ms. Kaushal gained her bachelor’s degree in non-medical (2016) from Hans Raj Mahila Maha Vidyalaya College, Punjab. For her bachelor’s thesis, she worked on a project titled, “Kinetics and Thermodynamic Study of Adsorption of Cr (VI) on the Low-cost Leaf Powders” under the DST-STAR grant of Department of Biotechnology. Her master’s degree is in physics (2018) from Lovely Professional University, Punjab, where she was awarded a gold medal for securing first rank in the university. Here, she explored the NIR spectroscopy and Aqua-photomics for the detection of various adulterants in milk as her master’s thesis project and gained publications in the same. Apart from research, she has a keen interest in arts and crafts.

As a Fullbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Kaushal is targeting successful development of new photocatalytic materials for the degradation of organic pollutants in water. She believes these materials could have energy harvesting applications.

Sana Imtiazbhai Jindani

Ms. Sana Imtiazbhai Jindani is a Senior Research Fellow at CSIR-Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute (CSIR-CSMCRI), Bhavnagar, Gujarat. The focus of her doctoral research encompasses theoretical understanding of stereo-electronic interactions and their role in an interplay between structure and reactivity of organic- and bio-molecules. She combines a variety of computational tools to gain a full understanding of these subtle but decisive interactions. Apart from her thesis work, she enjoys collaboration and has published collaborative work in peer-reviewed international journals.

Ms. Jindani graduated in inorganic chemistry from The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Gujarat. As a part of her M.Sc. dissertation, she focused on developing ruthenium complexes as DNA binders. Before joining her Ph.D., she worked as Assistant Professor at C U Shah University, Gujarat, where she delivered lectures to B.S. and M.S. students on topics in inorganic chemistry.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Jindani is working on overcoming the reactivity/stability trade-offs of click reagents for biorthogonal reactions through strain reinforcement and stereo-electronic stabilization. These biorthogonal reactions will be utilized for bio-molecular labelling without interfering with natural biological processes. In addition to her research work, Ms. Jindani hopes to encourage and promote Indian traditional yoga practices at her host institution for an active and healthy lifestyle.

Md Haseen Akhtar

Md. Haseen Akhtar is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Design, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh and a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship. His doctoral thesis focuses on design, development, and deployment of a cost-effective mobile Primary Health Centre (mPHC) for low-resource settings. His research has been published in peer-reviewed international journals, and he has presented at several national and international conferences. He is interested in sustainable and responsible design.

Mr. Akhtar holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the National Institute of Technology, Trichy, Tamil Nadu, and a master’s degree in design from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. He was the Gold Medalist of B.Arch. (2015-2020), was awarded the outstanding student award and was the recipient of four consecutive academic excellence scholarships (2016-2019) from the alumni association, RECAL of NIT Trichy. He is a registered architect with the Council of Architecture. He has an interest in design for society and enjoys traveling in the mountains and meeting people from various cultures.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Mr. Akhtar is exploring design and development of collapsible sub-systems of mobile Primary Health Centre (mPHC) for low-resource settings. His focus is to design sub-systems that take up the least amount of space and are easily portable by increasing their collapsibility.

Utpalendu Haldar

Mr. Utpalendu Haldar earned his bachelor’s and master’s in geology from Jadavpur University and subsequently started his career as a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is working under the supervision of Prof. Ramananda Chakrabarti and is exploring the chemical evolution of earth’s continental crust. Towards this end, he has been using novel isotopic tracers on unique archives, such as komatiites, loess and glacial diamictites. He has been working in collaborations with both national and foreign universities during his tenure as a doctoral candidate.

Mr. Haldar is enthusiastic towards promoting science in all sections of society and dedicates his leisure time towards this goal. He firmly believes that co-curricular activities help nurture the best in us and has represented IISc in cricket in multiple national events. Thus, he considers the Fulbright-Nehru fellowship an opportunity to learn about and cherish the culture of the American west coast.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Mr. Haldar is working to enhance the understanding of crust-mantle interaction and magma chamber processes. He is investigating fluid inclusions in basalts from the Deccan Volcanic Province (DVP) to further his doctoral work.

Rajneesh Gupta

Mr. Rajneesh Gupta is a public servant with 24 years of experience in project execution, policy analysis, maintenance, academia, and research. He is serving as Executive Director/S&T at Research Design & Standards Organization in Lucknow under the Ministry of Railways, Government of India. Before taking on this role, Mr. Gupta was Professor (NM) at the National Academy of Indian Railways, Vadodara, where he trained over 2500 professionals from diverse categories, seniority levels, and domains.

He holds a bachelor’s in electronics and communication engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee (1998) and an advanced degree in public policy from the Indian School of Business, Mohali. Additionally, he has a master’s in arts with a specialization in industrial psychology. At present, he is pursuing a doctoral degree in organizational behavior and human resource management from the Birla Institute of Management Technology, Greater Noida. His passions include yoga, meditation, running, and reading.

Mr. Gupta’s Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research focuses on uncovering the key to better public services in India. He is passionate about exploring the intersection of job demand, resources, organizational behavior, and human resource capabilities in the public sector. The goal of his Ph.D. is to identify the critical role that public service motivation plays in enhancing efficiency and driving positive outcomes for citizens.

Ahana Ghosh

Ms. Ahana Ghosh is a doctoral scholar and Teaching Assistant at the Archaeological Sciences Centre, Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat. She is also a student ambassador from South Asia for the Society for Archaeological Sciences. She completed her master’s and M.Phil. in archaeology from the University of Kolkata, Kolkata, and Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute, Pune, Maharashtra respectively. Her research interest is grounded in the food archaeology of South Asia. Her work also elucidates the concept of “culinary landscape” and different aspects of “realities” and “representations” of food.

In the past, Ms. Ghosh held an Early Career Researcher position at the Rewriting World Archaeology program, Durham University, UK, and was Visiting Researcher at Stockholm University, Sweden as well as at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, US. She has published and co-authored papers and book chapters in many reputed international peer-reviewed journals like Holocene, Radio-Carbon, and Zenedo, and also presented her work at many international conferences. Moreover, she received “Student Research Support” from the Society for Archaeological Sciences for her doctoral project, and has shot a documentary film on the culinary journey of the communities living in the Dholavira village, Rann of Kutch, Gujarat.

Ms. Ghosh’s doctoral project explores the foodways of ancient Harappans from some of the selected settlements located in different geographical zones, like the Kutch region of Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Himachal Pradesh. Within foodways, she aims to explore their dietary and ritual practices by examining the biomolecular components lying in the organic residues within ceramics used by the inhabitants of these settlements. Dietary studies are still in the embryonic phase in South Asian archaeology. Thus, conventional ceramic studies must be reassessed and augmented with the latest scientific methodologies and different nuances of food anthropology and cultural ecology to develop a broader view of ancient foodways at the site-specific and panoptic regional level for the subcontinent’s first complex society. For the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Ghosh is working on the methodological and interpretational part of her doctoral project and is combining analytical outcomes with food anthropological theoretical abstractions.

Kashish Dua

Ms. Kashish Dua is a doctoral candidate in English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and Assistant Professor, Department of English, Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi. Her Ph.D. examines the intersections of queerness, personal narratives, and citizenship in the context of post-Independence India. This project aims to expand the current theorizations on citizenship in India by interrogating the forms citizenship takes in the case of queer individuals. It particularly focuses on the construction of the subject and the process of subjectivation in personal narratives in print by queer individuals of Indian origin. She has an M.Phil. with distinction in English from Jamia Millia Islamia and a master’s and bachelor’s in English from Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. Her research interests are queer studies, gender and South Asian literature, and partition literature.

Ms. Dua has conducted several workshops and delivered talks on queer theory and queer literature, including a panel discussion at the first Awadh Queer Literature Festival, Lucknow in 2019. Some of her publications include an edited critical edition of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It published by Prentice Hall India in 2019; a co-authored encyclopedia entry on “LGBTQ and Hinduism” for Oxford Bibliographies, published online by the Oxford University Press in 2022; a chapter titled “Rainbow Waters: Towards a Queer Coalition between India and Botswana” in a Routledge India book Cosmopolitan Cultures and Oceanic Thought (2023) edited by Dilip Menon and Nishat Zaidi; and an article on “Ismat Chughtai’s Obscenity Trial” forthcoming in The LGBTQ+ History Book by DK London. Ms. Dua was a member of the organizing committee of an international conference titled “Language Ideologies and the ‘Vernacular’ in South Asian Colonial and Post-colonial Literature(s) and Public Spheres” in 2021 that was organized through the collaborative efforts of the University of Heidelberg, Germany and the SPARC project on “Debating and Calibrating the Vernacular in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asian Literature and Culture” by the Ministry of Education, Government of India.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Dua is striving to decolonize the genre of queer memoirs through a comparative study of queer personal writings in India and the “coming out” narratives of the Global North.

Prateek Dey

Mr. Prateek Dey is a Ph.D. candidate at Sálim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. Through his doctoral thesis, he aims to assess genomic variations in select species of wild and domestic quails. Utilizing a combination of field data, next generation sequencing methods and bioinformatics tools, he aims to comprehensively map differences amongst morphologically similar quail species at a genomic scale. The findings of his doctoral thesis have been presented and published in various national and international conferences and journals.

Mr. Dey graduated with a degree in Integrated M.Sc. in life sciences from the Central University of Tamil Nadu. He has qualified for national level examinations such as GATE, CUCET and BU-CET with top ranks. Apart from academic interests in genetics, he likes to spend time trekking, birding and exploring serene or unexplored nature reserves. He also has a keen interest in cooking and in reading books related to historical events and personalities.

During his Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Mr. Dey is studying the demographic history and phylogenetic topology of Coturnix quails through whole genome approaches. He is working on assembling a high-quality genome of Coturnix coturnix, tracing its demographic history through coalescent modelling and generating a species level phylogenetic tree of the same. Through collaborative efforts, the findings of this study will bring forth a plethora of genome based evolutionary inferences that will be of high conservation importance for a wide variety of co-generic species in India.

Nikhil Dev Narendradev

Mr. Nikhil Dev Narendradev is a graduate student at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. His research interests lie broadly in mitochondrial homeostasis with a focus on understanding the cross-talk between endosomal E3 ligases and mitochondrial proteins. He co-authored some of his findings as publications in peer-reviewed international journals and at international conferences.

Mr. Narendradev holds an integrated master’s degree (BS-MS) in biological sciences with physical sciences as minor from IISER Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. He was awarded a very competitive INSPIRE-SHE fellowship by the Government of India as an undergraduate. He is recipient of fellowships from the Indian Academy of Science and the National University of Singapore to pursue his research interests during summer in India and Singapore. Outside the laboratory, he takes satisfaction in working with the underprivileged, participating in outreach activities, and in teaching. He likes to spend time traveling, meeting new people, understanding diverse cultures, and enjoys beaches and mountains.

During the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship period, Mr. Narendradev is employing cutting-edge proteomics technology tools to investigate signaling events involved in mitochondrial homeostasis, with a particular focus on identifying post-translational modifications that regulate mitochondrial structure and function. Research findings from this work are expected to unravel novel regulatory mechanisms required for maintaining a healthy population of mitochondria and to help identify potential targets for therapeutic intervention in pathological conditions.