Fulbright-Nehru Grant Categorys USA: Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research)

Ramakanth Kavuluru

Dr. Ramakanth Kavuluru is a professor of biomedical informatics (Department of Internal Medicine) in the College of Medicine at the University of Kentucky (UKY). He also has a joint courtesy appointment in the Department of Computer Science at UKY. He graduated with a PhD in computer science in 2009 from UKY with a focus on the security properties of pseudorandom sequences. Subsequently, he worked in knowledge-based search systems for focused bioscience domains as a postdoctoral scholar at Wright State University. Since 2011, he has been working as a faculty member at UKY focusing on natural language processing methods and their use in biomedicine and healthcare.

High-level applications of Dr. Kavuluru’s research include cohort selection for clinical trials, literature-based knowledge discovery, computer-assisted coding, social media-based surveillance for substance abuse, and clinical-decision support for precision medicine. He employs methods from machine learning (including deep learning) and data mining fields to drive his research agenda. His recent methodological contributions deal with zero-shot and few-shot classification, large language models, transfer learning, domain adaptation, and end-to-end relation extraction. Thus far, in his capacity as primary advisor, he has helped seven doctoral students and 10 master’s students attain their graduation.

Predicting disease onset ahead of time is an important application of artificial intelligence (AI) and this is being actively pursued in the U.S. and other western nations. From a global health perspective, it is not clear if the implications of the findings of U.S. patient-based modeling translate to more populous and diverse areas of the world. Thus, using latest machine learning methods and data sets from Indian healthcare facilities, Dr. Kavuluru’s Fulbright-Nehru project is rigorously assessing how well the promise of AI holds when applied to the Indian patient setting compared to the simpler standard-of-care approaches to risk stratification.

Aparna Kapadia

Dr. Aparna Kapadia is associate professor of history at Williams College. She is a social historian of early modern and modern South Asia. Her research particularly focuses on western Indian regional cultures, identities, and power structures as well as the subcontinent’s links with the Indian Ocean networks. Dr. Kapadia studied at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, from where she received her PhD in 2013. From 2009 until 2011, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford.

Dr. Kapadia is the author of In Praise of Kings: Rajputs, Sultans and Poets in Fifteenth-Century Gujarat (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and co-editor of The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text (Orient Blackswan, 2010). Her articles have appeared in several peer-reviewed academic journals like The Mediaeval History Journal and The Journal of Asian Studies. From 2021 to 2024, she served as associate editor at the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Dr. Kapadia also enjoys writing for popular asudiences. Since 2019, she has been publishing a column on a variety of topics in South Asian history called “Off Centre” in Scroll.in, one of India’s leading independent English-language digital publications.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Kapadia is conducting research for her upcoming book, Walking with the Mahatma: Kasturba Gandhi’s Political Life. This will be the first historically grounded and archivally researched biography of Kasturba (1869–1944), Mahatma Gandhi’s wife, which seeks to illuminate her pivotal but overlooked role as a political activist during India’s anti-colonial movement.

Beena (Veena) Howard

Dr. Beena (Veena) Howard is professor of Asian religious traditions in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Fresno. She holds the Endowed Chair in Jain and Hindu Dharma, and also serves as the director of the M.K. Gandhi Center: Inner Peace and Sarvodaya. Her publications include the books Gandhi’s Global Legacy: Moral Methods and Moral Challenges (ed., Lexington, 2023); The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy and Gender (ed., Bloomsbury, 2019); Dharma, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Sikh Traditions of India (ed., I.B. Tauris, 2017); and Gandhi’s Ascetic Activism: Renunciation and Social Action (SUNY Press, 2013). She has also authored numerous peer-reviewed articles, including “The Nonviolence Conundrum: Political Peace and Personal Karma in Jain and Hindu Traditions”; “Nonviolence as Love in Action: James Lawson’s Transforming the Promise of Jesus’ Love into a Practical Force for Change”; “Divine Light and Melodies Lead the Way: The Santmat Tradition of Bihar”; “Lessons from ‘The Hawk and the Dove’: Reflections on the Mahābhārata’s Animal Parables and Ethical Predicaments”; and “Rethinking Gandhi’s Celibacy: Ascetic Power and the Empowerment of Women”. Notably, she has served on the Board of Trustees of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Dr. Howard is also a TEDx speaker.

Using philosophical and textual approaches and women and gender studies theories, Dr. Howard’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is seeking to create a conversation with the Jain advocates of women’s equality and education, Shrimad Rajchandra (1867–1901) and Virchand Gandhi (1864–1901), while studying the life and work of the female Jain activist, Mridula Sarabhai (1911–1973). Born in a distinguished family, Sarabhai adopted an austere life, defied patriarchal norms, and made heroic efforts to rehabilitate abducted Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim women in violence-stricken areas. Through archival resources, engagement with faculty and students at the International School of Jain Studies and local universities, as well as through interviews with the Sarabhai family and Jain female leaders and followers, Dr. Howard is seeking to further the questions of women’s struggle against gender bias and violence.

Hessam Ghamari

Dr. Hessam Ghamari is associate professor of interior design in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). With over 15 years of experience as an architect and interior designer across Iran and the United States, Dr. Ghamari brings a wealth of expertise to his role. His professional journey spans diverse projects in healthcare, hospitality, commercial spaces, and residential design. Before joining CSUN, Dr. Ghamari taught at Appalachian State University for four years. In 2014, he earned his PhD in environmental interior design from Texas Tech University, marking a pivotal point in his academic and research pursuits. He has authored numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and has presented at international conferences, focusing on topics like environmental psychology, evidence-based design, and healthcare environments.

Central to Dr. Ghamari’s design philosophy is a deep-rooted belief in addressing the physiological and psychological needs of individuals through interior spaces. He champions the creation of healthy, humanistic environments that positively impact users’ quality of life across diverse settings. His interdisciplinary approach integrates insights from environmental psychology, healthcare design, and evidence-based practices to enhance health and well-being outcomes. Currently, Dr. Ghamari holds significant leadership roles as the director of Strategic Initiatives and as a board member at the Interior Design Educators Council. He also serves as the director of Academy Awards and as a board member at the International Academy of Design and Health. Dr. Ghamari has received prestigious awards, including the Irene Winifred Eno Grant from the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID).

Dr. Ghamari’s Fulbright-Nehru research, in collaboration with the National Institute of Technology Calicut, is assessing the quality of physical environments in Indian hospitals using evidence-based healthcare design principles. With its focus on patient safety, infection control, and staff well-being, the study is employing a comprehensive data collection approach involving quantitative and qualitative methods and field observations. By investigating factors such as accessibility, sustainability, and staff workflow, the research aims to improve healthcare spaces and outcomes in India.

Lynna Dhanani

Dr. Lynna Dhanani obtained her doctorate from Yale University and joined the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis, in 2020 as an assistant professor of religious studies. She is currently working on her first major monograph, tentatively titled “Authority and Wonder: The Devotional Worlds of Hemacandra and Other Medieval Gujarati Hymn-makers”. Her research explores the confluence of interreligious polemics, philosophical debates, devotional themes, and poetics in the Sanskrit hymns of the celebrated 12th-century Svetambara Jain, Hemacandra, a court pandit to two Hindu kings of medieval Gujarat. Having dedicated herself to the study of multiple Indian religions for more than two decades, Dr. Dhanani has a wide range of interests, including Jainism, Sanskrit and Prakrit languages and literature, Indian philosophy and aesthetics, yoga, tantra, and especially South Asian religious art.

In 2023, she co-curated an exhibition at the UCLA Fowler Museum called “Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings”, and is currently a co-author for the exhibition book. As a recipient of the Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellowship (2022–23) and as part of the “Entanglements of Indian Pasts” project, she has shared her work on the great 20th-century Jain scholar Muni Jambuvijaya and his manuscript preservation projects. In 2022, she was the main organizer of the field-defining conference “Beyond Boundaries: In Honor of John E. Cort”, which brought together numerous scholars in honor of Dr. Cort, a prolific scholar in the fields of Jain and South Asian studies.

Dr. Dhanani’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the diversity of Jain hymns produced in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Apabhramsha languages in 11th–13th century Gujarat by the polymath Hemacandra and his contemporaries; the objective is to understand better their perceptions of the broader religious and intellectual worlds in which they flourished and their relationship with religious centers and the royal courts. In this context, she is exploring several libraries across north-west India and engaging local scholars, Jain communities, and Indian institutions in order to collect and analyze these hymns. This work will inform her first book manuscript as well as other publications.

Shalini Ayyagari

Prof. Shalini Ayyagari is an associate professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh and an ethnomusicologist who works across the fields of music in cultural contexts, South Asian studies, critical ethnography, and development studies.

Her first book, Music Resilience: Performing Manganiyar Music in the Indian Thar Desert, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2022, and is based on 15 years of ethnographic fieldwork and primary sources research. Musical Resilience is a sociocultural history and musical ethnography of the Manganiyar, a hereditary community of caste-based musicians who live in the Thar Desert on the India–Pakistan border and have maintained music within a patronage system as their livelihood for centuries. In the book, Prof. Ayyagari chronicles the ways hereditary professional musicians in South Asia continue to make a relevant living through music despite postcolonial rearrangements of traditional patronage relationships and despite economic hardships and the lure of more lucrative non-music professions.

Prof. Ayyagari was previously on the faculty at American University. Before that, she held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at Dartmouth College and a Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation/Teaching Predoctoral Fellowship at Kenyon College. She received her PhD in music with a focus on ethnomusicology from the University of California, Berkeley, where her dissertation research was partially funded by a Fulbright IIE fellowship. She completed her BA from Swarthmore College.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Ayyagari is centering the voices and music of the Manganiyar through collaboration, curation, and the archiving of their ethnographic video, audio, and written materials. She is also piecing together the archival materials (1965–2003) of the late Komal Kothari, the main cultural entrepreneur who took these musicians and their music to the world outside their villages. This archive was recently digitized at the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (ARCE). Prof. Ayyagari is also working with the Manganiyar musicians to tell their own stories through transmediated filmmaking as practice for co-authorship and collaboration.