Fulbright-Nehru Grant Categorys USA: Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program

Kizil Yusoof

Kizil Yusoof is a doctoral student working under the supervision of Dr. Purnima Madhivanan in the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona. Kizil earned an MS in immunology and infection from UT Health San Antonio in 2018. Her graduate research focused on the development of point-of-care diagnostics for drug-resistant tuberculosis. Following her master’s degree, Kizil continued working in biomedical research, investigating the neuroimmune mechanisms of chemotherapy-induced neuropathic pain.

In 2024, Kizil transitioned into the field of public health where her research interests expanded to cancer prevention, health promotion, and epidemiology. Her current work focuses on understanding the prevention of cervical cancer through community-centered and population health approaches, with an emphasis on improving awareness, access, and preventive care.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Kizil is examining the influence of religious and cultural beliefs on cervical cancer prevention and HPV vaccine decision-making in the urban communities of Mysuru, India. Specifically, she is using a community-based participatory research approach, including focus group discussions and photovoice, to understand how cultural and religious values impact attitudes toward cervical cancer prevention and vaccine uptake. The study is being conducted in collaboration with the JSS Academy of Higher Education and Research and the Public Health Research Institute of India, an NIH training site for global health research. The overall goal is to deploy culturally relevant strategies to improve HPV vaccine rollout and uptake in order to address the 2030 WHO strategic target of eliminating cervical cancer.

Shreeya Yarlagadda

Shreeya Yarlagadda is a recent graduate from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, where she earned a BS honors in neuroscience and psychology, with a minor in medicine, literature, and culture. During her time at UNC, Shreeya was an Accelerated Research Scholar and conducted research across multiple settings, including the Neurocognition and Imaging Research Lab, the Department of Radiation Oncology at UNC Health, and the THRIVE Clinic. She completed her honors thesis on the safety of re-irradiation for high-grade gliomas, and continues to be passionate about the intersection of the humanities and sciences, with a particular focus on quality of life and palliative care.

Throughout her undergraduate career, she engaged with, created, and led multiple student organizations. As founder of Art and the Brain at UNC, Shreeya fostered conversations integrating philosophy, art, and medicine, building metaphors to deepen understanding of neurological illness and mental health. She also founded the Global Women’s Narrative Project at UNC, creating a platform for local stories and empowering change through narratives. Shreeya is also passionate about health humanities, and had authored three pieces for the Health Humanities Journal at UNC.

A Kuchipudi dancer for nearly 15 years, she was a proud member of UNC’s classical dance team, Ek Taal. She views dance as a living connection between her culture and her identity. Seeing herself as an artist, she turns to Indian classical dances and writing as outlets that run parallel to her interests in healthcare.

Shreeya’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is investigating community perceptions about HPV-related head and neck cancers, and is also evaluating the efficacy of existing interventions in India. Her study involves engaging with underserved communities and healthcare workers to build a nuanced understanding of the stigma surrounding HPV. The goal is to identify trends in existing beliefs and guide the development of educational and interventional materials that minimize health inequities and raise broader awareness across India.

Theresia von Weiss

Theresia von Weiss earned a BA in philosophy and studio art from St. Catherine University in 2023, where they were an Antonian Honors Scholar and graduated summa cum laude. Their academic and creative work centers on community-engaged art, environmental stewardship, philosophy, and cross-cultural collaboration. During their undergraduate studies, they contributed to projects exploring public art, social practice, and institutional history, including a student-led initiative focused on acquiring and exhibiting artwork by BIPOC artists for the university community.

Theresia has worked across nonprofit, educational, and arts organizations in roles emphasizing communication, collaboration, and public engagement. As a communications intern at Mary’s Pence, they supported nonprofit outreach efforts through writing and grant development. They later served as a teaching assistant for the course “Building a Creative Life” at St. Catherine University, where they collaborated on curriculum development and mentored students in realizing creative projects. Theresia’s current interests include philosophy of art, spiritual philosophy, environmental justice, and community-based artistic practice.

Theresia’s Fulbright-Nehru project is connecting the philosophy of art with the philosophy of religion. They are researching and writing about whether spiritual leaders are themselves considered artists. While current philosophical writing on the aesthetics of spiritual experience directly relates to visual arts and the concept of beauty, Theresia’s philosophy sets out the argument that spiritual leaders are artists. Since fundamental questions such as what an artist is and what art is are the most commonly explored concepts in the field of philosophy of art and aesthetics, looking at spiritual experiences as art steers that conversation toward a new and vital direction.

Patrick Vogel

Patrick Vogel is an artist based in Los Angeles. Born in West Hollywood, he grew up acting on film sets and learned to transpose that collaborative spirit to his multidisciplinary path as a visual artist. Through sculpture, drawing, installation, and painting, he explores the inner and outer conditions of exhibition making in the twenty-first century.

Patrick’s transdisciplinary approach is unique, reflective of a conceptual practice grounded in site-specific research, happenstance, and an expanded art historical paradigm. His practice reveals power structures formed by particular stories that we tell ourselves, namely of imperialism, colonialism, and race prejudice, and the lethal epistemes branching out of them. His most recent work, the Hermit Series, takes on Roman and Gothic architectural forms, overlaid with photographs of palaces and royal doorways, which are then digitally carved, painted, and printed onto mirrors. Throughout, he deploys gesture and abstraction to produce an architectural palimpsest, a relic covered in futuristic cave paintings, which interrupts a clean reading of Western ideology as neutral, invisible, or inherent.

Patrick has traveled, taught, and lived across six continents. He received his BFA from Oregon Center for the Arts in Ashland, Oregon, and his MFA in art and technology from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. He has been an artist-in-residence at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Vermont Studio Center.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Patrick is studying British colonial architecture and native Indian architecture in Bengaluru, and developing a new series of installations in response. Through research and dialogue, he seeks to understand the varied epistemologies that became constructed public spaces in Bengaluru, spaces that owe its origins to different continents and cultures entirely. Through this project, he hopes for a broader perspective on global communities, how they interact, affect one another, and hybridize over time, and how we might, with clarity and focus, produce different spaces to better navigate the coming centuries. As part of the project, he is also a visiting artist-professor at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, where he is engaging with BFA/MA students in the Contemporary Art Practice program.

Eric Villalobos

Eric Villalobos is a fourth-year PhD student in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. His research uses ethnographic and historical methodologies to examine the so-called “semi-renunciant” yati monastic lineages within Mūrtipūjaka Śvetāmbara Jainism in North India. This project takes him through the history of Indian monasticism, astrology, mantra science, and the colonial encounter with South Asian Indigenous medical systems. Eric received his BA in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his MA in South Asian area studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Eric’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the historical collaboration between Rajasthani kingdoms and Jain merchant communities in promoting Jain monks as medical practitioners during the colonial era. He is seeking answers as to how and why Jain monks, supported by Rajasthani kings and the Jain merchant community, transformed modern Āyurveda into a distinctly Hindu-identified medical science. To this end, he is conducting research in Rajasthan State Archives at Bikaner, examining the royal court documents of the Rajput kingdoms, especially of Bikaner, Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Udaipur. Beyond this, he is gathering oral histories about Jain monastic rest houses which functioned as traditional medical houses during the colonial period.

Sheel Trivedi

Sheel Trivedi is a graduate of Yale University, where he earned a BS in neuroscience and a certificate in global health studies. His professional work sits at the intersection of neurological research and social science, with a dedicated focus on the unique healthcare challenges facing older adults. He is committed to applying a patient-centered approach to medicine, utilizing insights from both basic laboratory science and community-based research to improve health equity.

During his three years in the Cafferty Lab at the Yale School of Medicine, Sheel investigated intact corticospinal tract (CST) synaptic plasticity following spinal cord injury and rehabilitation. Beyond his work at Yale, Sheel is a research affiliate with the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, where he is working on a project exploring the financial planning and life expectations of older adults living with HIV in Philadelphia.

Outside of his research, Sheel led student organizations at Yale focused on South Asian culture and STEM education, and served as a student fellow at the South Asian Studies Council at the MacMillan Center. In the New Haven community, he remained engaged through dementia-related volunteering and community blood pressure screenings.

Sheel’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the challenges of “transnational caregiving” for persons with dementia in Bengaluru, India, who have relatives in the United States. Affiliated with NIMHANS, the project is conducting semi-structured qualitative interviews with multiple “transnational caregiving units” comprising patients, local caregivers, healthcare professionals, and U.S.-based relatives. By identifying, through NVivo analysis, themes such as communication difficulties, expectational burden, and economic impacts, Sheel’s research aims to inform culturally sensitive care frameworks and contribute to India’s dementia action plans to improve well-being for transnational families.

David St. John

David St. John is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Riverside, in the Department for the Study of Religion. His research interests include identity-making practices, end-of-life rituals, religious and constitutional law, decolonial theory in South Asia, South Asian history, gendered and ontological knowledge systems, and religious ethics in contemporary practice.

David’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the history of Jain identity building and self-representation during India’s late British colonial period. It is focusing on Champat Rai Jain (1867–1942), a leading lay Jain intellectual of the time, who promoted the development of a universal Jain identity. For the project, David is analyzing Champat Rai’s published works, contracts from publishing houses, and other archival materials. The aim of such an analysis is to show how Jain concerns evolved into strategies that shaped the way Jain identity was legally constructed.

Shravya Sompalli

Shravya Sompalli is a graduate of Brown University with an ScB in computer science and ethnic studies. While a researcher in the Human Trafficking Research Cluster at the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, she worked closely with the grassroots collective Red Canary Song to visualize and communicate changes over the past two decades in the policing of Asian massage work – commonly portrayed as synonymous with human trafficking – in New York. Partly building on this work, Shravya’s senior thesis investigated the integration of technological tools and discourses surrounding the potential of technology in the work of state and corporate anti-trafficking actors while considering the limitations of technological initiatives from the perspective of grassroots organizations.

She also worked in the Sociotechnical Systems and Wellbeing Research Lab (SWRL) at Brown, using mixed computational and qualitative methods to facilitate a greater understanding of how posters on online forums sought help on reproductive health-related concerns in 2024. After graduating, Shravya conducted data and policy work in support of Cook County’s Human Rights Ordinance as an applied data fellow in the county’s Department of Human Rights and Ethics.

Given the growing interest of many international anti-trafficking actors in the potential of interventional technology, Shravya’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining how anti-trafficking NGOs in Bengaluru are using technology in their victim identification and empowerment initiatives. This project seeks to build an understanding of the perceptions of NGO employees on the efficacy and usability of technological tools. It also aims to find out how users identify and balance potential privacy and security concerns with the adoption of such tools.

Pranav Shibu

Pranav Shibu graduated from Johns Hopkins University in May 2025 with a BS in molecular and cellular biology and public health studies. His coursework spanned molecular biology, biochemistry, cognitive neuroscience, developmental genetics, epidemiology, and qualitative research methods, thus building an interdisciplinary foundation for work at the intersection of laboratory science and community health. Currently, Pranav serves as a mid-level research technician in the Shakkottai Lab at UT Southwestern Medical Center, where he investigates KCNH3 ion channel dysfunction in spinocerebellar ataxia using patch-clamp electrophysiology, stereological analysis, and rotarod behavioral assays in mouse models. His research trajectory has spanned three additional academic laboratories: the Lloyd Lab at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine; the Berth/Lloyd Lab at Baylor College of Medicine, where he studied dynactin-related neuromuscular degeneration in drosophila; and the Farah Lab at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

His clinical experience includes four years as a medical assistant at America First Urgent Care in Coppell, Texas, and ongoing work at the Union Gospel Mission Calvert Clinic in Dallas, where he serves an underserved homeless population.

Outside of medicine and research, Pranav competed on the Johns Hopkins NCAA men’s varsity fencing team and coaches young athletes at Go Fence Academy.

Pranav’s Fulbright-Nehru research is examining informal diabetes caregiving in rural Kerala, where India’s second-highest diabetes prevalence places disproportionate burden on family caregivers in resource-poor households. Although 80 percent of this chronic disease care occurs at home, the labor remains largely undocumented in formal healthcare planning. Based at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences in Kochi and working under Dr. Renjith Bhadran, Pranav is conducting trauma-informed, semi-structured interviews with family caregivers, community health workers, and primary care providers across Ernakulam, Palakkad, and Wayanad districts. Drawing on Johns Hopkins public health training and native Malayalam-language fluency, the project will make visible the essential caregiving labor sustaining chronic disease management in resource-constrained settings.

Madhura Shembekar

Madhura Shembekar, originally from Scottsdale, Arizona, is a recent graduate from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service with a degree in science, technology, and international affairs (concentration: energy/environment), and a minor in Spanish. She has strong research interests in climate adaptation, sustainable urban development, and environmental migration and displacement. She has worked for the Kuskokwim Watershed Coalition, conducting a risk assessment of mercury mobilization in Alaska, and for the Georgetown Climate Center, researching state- and local-level climate adaptation policy.

At Georgetown University, she was awarded honors for completion of a thesis on climate-induced migration and displacement in South Asia. A Lannan Fellow, Sustainable Business Fellow (McDonough School of Business), and a Krogh Honors Scholar, Madhura is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Sigma Nu honor societies. For her work on environmental issues, she was also given the Lena Landegger Community Service Award. Madhura is an avid tennis enthusiast and loves to dance.

Madhura’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is studying the role of civil society groups and nongovernmental organizations in shaping coastal adaptation and urban resilience in Mumbai. In particular, her project is examining the adoption of “natural” infrastructure, sometimes termed “blue-green” infrastructure, such as urban wetlands and water plazas, as an alternative to traditional structures. Through mixed-methods research involving interviews of civil society organizations and analysis of gray literature, she aims to understand public perceptions about such infrastructure, barriers to its adoption, and its potential for supporting coastal resilience and adaptation. The project consolidates Madhura’s interest in inclusive urban development and community-based adaptation policy.