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

Apoorva Singh

Apoorva Singh is a Ph.D. candidate at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru. His doctoral thesis focuses on understanding the charge transport and degradation mechanisms in perovskite based solar cells and devices incorporating device fabrication and advanced electrical, optical and materials characterizations. Apoorva has published academic papers and presented his work at various national and international conferences. He has collaborated with prominent international research groups and research facilities including ones at the University of Oxford and Soleil French-National Synchrotron Facility.

Apoorva holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from MJP Rohilkhand University, Bareilly, and a master’s degree in engineering by research from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru. After completing his master’s from JNCASR and prior to joining the Ph.D. program at IISc, Apoorva served as a senior project associate at the National Centre for Flexible Electronics, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, Apoorva is studying perovskite solar cells, investigating the evolution in defects and recombination mechanisms at different stages of degradation through spectroscopic procedures. The insights gained from his research will contribute to achieving optimal device performance and stability in the field. Apoorva actively organizes and takes on leadership roles in various academic and cultural activities. He is a music enthusiast, with skill in live mixing, and he also enjoys reading, playing chess, and exploring new places.

Harish Sankar Aghila

Harish S A is a Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. The broader domains encompassing his research interests include networks, systems, and security. His current research explores the security implications of in-network systems that leverage cutting-edge technologies like software-defined networks and programmable data planes.

Harish is a recipient of the prestigious Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship (PMRF) awarded by the Ministry of Education, Government of India. As a part of his doctoral research, he actively engaged in a security project alongside ASEAN countries and participated in their student exchange program. He published research papers and presented his work at reputed international venues. Additionally, he has received the notable SIGCOMM travel grant award, among many others.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from the National Institute of Technology Puducherry, during which time he interned with the UMR TETIS Joint Research Unit in Montpellier, France. He holds a master’s degree in computer engineering (cyber security) from the National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at the University of Texas, Austin, TX, Harish is examining to secure data-driven, in-network systems built on high-speed programmable data planes against adversarial inputs. His vision is to bolster the resilience of next-generation computer networks against security threats. Harish teaches undergraduate students about network security. He enjoys road trips and chess.

Pavithra Venkataraman

Ms. Pavithra Venkataraman is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai. Her research is in the area of evolutionary biology. Specifically, she uses experimental methods to understand the evolution of proteins, and theoretical methods to understand the evolution of metabolic cooperation and sympatric speciation in a population.

Ms. Venkataraman completed her bachelor’s in chemical engineering from M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bengaluru. In 2020, she was awarded the Best Outgoing Chemical Engineering Student by the Bangalore Chapter of the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers. She enjoys exploring new places, cuisines and cultures. She also likes learning new languages.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, she will work with Prof. Sergey Kryazhimskiy to characterize the variation in the local structure of fitness landscapes to assess the predictability of evolution. This work is important to build our understanding of the process of evolution as a whole and has implications for pathogen evolution and human health.

Divya Swaminathan

Ms. Divya Swaminathan is a Ph.D. scholar at the Infant – Toddler Language Development and Intervention Lab, Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru. Before joining NIMHANS for her Ph.D., Ms. Swaminathan worked at the St. John’s National Academy of Health Sciences, Bengaluru, where she worked on developing an early screening tool for identifying increased likelihood for autism (HL-ASD) in infants between 9-18 months. She is a passionate clinician – researcher with expertise in detection of and intervention for autism.

Ms. Swaminathan’s current area of research focuses on early caregiver speech (CGS) and its impact on the development of communication and language skills in infants at HL-ASD. She is using automatic speech recognition (ASR) models to evaluate early CGS.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Swaminathan has joined Dr. Marisa Casillas’s lab. Ms. Swaminathan is working on improving existing ASR models that are sensitive to a multilingual setup. More accurate ASR models will help automatize amount of CGS that otherwise require laborious hand annotation

Devika Singh Shekhawat

Ms. Devika Singh Shekhawat is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi. She has a master’s in sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research interests lies at the intersection of gender and labor studies, public health, migration studies, and developmental issues.

Ms. Shekhawat is a writer, educator and research scholar. She has written on the history and memory of migration of tea plantation workers of Assam for Zubaan Publication and co-authored a book chapter with the Programme of Social Actions – The Research Collective on the Ecological Crisis of Shrimp Aquaculture and discourses of migration and infiltration in Coastal Odisha. She has been a part of multiple projects that study rural public healthcare infrastructure, ecological conservation and labor relations in northeast India. Her research on the work of ASHA workers in tea plantations during the pandemic has been published as a book chapter with Northeast Social Research Centre and Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group.

Her Ph.D. research project explores the relationship between health and labor that manifests itself in the body of the worker and their everyday life. She engages with the nature of work, the production process that affects the health of the worker and the conditions for ailments and disease created for the worker in the tea plantations of Assam. Through a study of labor relations and structural conditions of work, her research attempts to explore how health and labor operate in tea plantations.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Shekhawat is working with Dr. Sarah Besky at the South Asia Program at Cornell University to carry forward her Ph.D. research work. She is focusing on how conditions of structural reproduction of ill-health are produced and understood within the plantation economy.

Shruti Singh

Ms. Shruti Singh is a doctoral candidate at the Computer Science and Engineering department, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Her research interests lie in the field of natural language processing, specifically in learning representations of scientific articles. Her research goal is to develop tools that assist researchers at various stages of the research cycle and democratize the entry of marginalized communities into research.

Ms. Singh received her bachelor’s in information and communication technology with a minor in computational sciences from Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gujarat. Post her bachelor’s, she worked as a research engineer at Raxter and a product engineer at Sprinklr.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Singh is working with Prof. Arman Cohan at Yale University on learning aspect-based representations for scientific articles. Aspect-based representations of research articles will enable fine-grained scholarly search, increase the productivity of researchers, and expedite the process of knowledge discovery.

Ardhra Shylendran

Ms. Ardhra Shylendran is a Ph.D. candidate at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, Maharashtra. Her doctoral thesis focuses on molecular dynamics simulations and modeling of ion transport in the alkali metal ion rechargeable battery electrolytes. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed international journals and presented at national and international conferences.

Before joining IISER Pune as a research scholar, Ms. Shylendran completed her BS-MS dual degree in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. She was a recipient of the INSPIRE scholarship from the Government of India during her BS-MS. She has also been awarded INSPIRE fellowship for pursuing her Ph.D. at IISER Pune.

Apart from science, she is interested in various kinds of arts like painting, drawing, and calligraphy. She is a classical dancer, trained in Bharatnatyam, and also practices yoga and meditation. She enjoys spending time on the beach and in the mountains and trekking/hiking. She loves to travel and meet people of various cultures.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Shylendran is exploring the computational modeling of solid electrolyte interphases. She is primarily working on finding alternatives to conventional electrolytic solvents and predicting their physical, structural, and dynamic properties using the existing computational tools.

Joel P Joseph

Mr. Joel P Joseph is a Ph.D. candidate at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, Karnataka. His doctoral thesis aims to develop a 3D bioprinted T cell culture platform to screen for novel immunomodulatory compounds and validate them using an in vivo mouse model of an autoimmune disease.

Before starting his Ph.D., Mr. Joseph was Junior Research Fellow at Manipal Institute of Regenerative Medicine, Bengaluru. Here, he investigated the roles of intracellular protein degradation and mitochondrial dynamics in the development of midbrain dopaminergic neurons in mice. Some of his research has been published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at national and international conferences.

He holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in biotechnology from Sir M Visvesvaraya Institute of Technology, Bengaluru, and a master of technology degree in genetic engineering from SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Kattankulathur, Tamil Nadu.

Mr. Joseph is particularly interested in science communication. His written words have appeared in several science media and education websites based in India. He loves to engage with people from diverse backgrounds and disciplines to exchange ideas on science, society, and culture. When he is not in the lab, he can be found reading, writing, listening to music, or watching stories based on real events.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Mr. Joseph is designing nanoparticulate drug delivery systems for immunomodulatory compounds. He is also comparing their efficacies with the free form of drugs using his 3D bioprinted T cell culture platform and validating them using a relevant in vivo mouse model.

Aditya Vijaykumar

Mr. Aditya Vijaykumar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Astrophysical Relativity group at ICTS-TIFR in Bengaluru, working on various aspects of physics, astrophysics, cosmology with gravitational waves. Before joining ICTS-TIFR, he was an undergraduate student at BITS-Pilani, where he received a dual degree in Physics and Mechanical Engineering in 2018.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, Vijaykumar plans to work on understanding gravitational-wave observations from the perspective of cosmological large-scale structure. The advantage of this approach is two-fold: one can confirm existing cosmological inferences from other probes, and independently understand formation environments and mechanisms of the detected gravitational-wave events.

Mr. Vijaykumar is also active in the Bengaluru theatre circuit, as a part of the theatre company StageCraft. Most recently, he was the co-producer of ZOOMED IN!, an online theatre production featuring actors situated across two time zones. He also is an ardent lover of films and runs a film-analysis podcast called Cut to Scene! with a friend.

Amal Vijay

Mr. Amal Vijay is pursuing his Ph.D. from the Computational Chemistry and Biophysics group, Department of Chemistry at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune. His current area of research focuses on studying the mechanism of various biomolecular recognition processes, specifically protein-drug and protein-protein interactions and secondary interactions in nucleotides using advanced molecular dynamics simulation techniques.

He completed his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the Loyola College, Chennai, India, and his master’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. He is a recipient of the Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) awarded by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). He is honored by the Rashtrapati Scout award, an award presented by the President of India for his achievement in scouting.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, Vijay is interested in understanding the scope of “RNA breathing” in RNA – protein recognition process using molecular dynamics simulation methods aided by enhanced sampling techniques in computational chemistry. The proposed study project can provide a significant impact on the role of RNA-based drug design for the cure of various diseases.