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

Natalie Callahan

Natalie Callahan graduated from Chatham University in 2023 with a degree in arts management and a degree in international studies. She also has a certificate in women’s leadership from the university. Natalie is particularly interested in matters of arts accessibility and community engagement in the arts. She loves to work with members of the public, especially in ways that help to excite them about the arts and encourage them to feel as though they are a part of the artistic community. She has explored many ways to increase arts exposure that go beyond traditional arts institutions. As the arts editor of her university’s literary magazine, she experimented with the idea of free, printed art through her curation of artists’ work in the magazine. She also explored how other media such as posters and stickers interacted with the university’s micro community. Besides, Natalie co-founded a fashion club on campus, framing fashion as the ultimate form of accessible art because, after all, everybody wears clothes. The fashion club offered affordable ways to create wearable items, funded trips to fashion history exhibitions, and contributed to the success of a campus-wide Sustainable Fashion Fair clothing swap. Following her graduation, Natalie worked at the Pittsburgh Glass Center, an arts nonprofit of the city. Here, she was able to engage in the many different glass art-making processes (including blown glass, flameworked glass, and fused glass) while helping the center carry out its mission of public access education and community building.

In her Fulbright-Nehru program, Natalie is creating a body of work emphasizing the beauty of the physical labor and skill involved in the Banarasi weaving process and, by extension, in art-making in general. She is creating a series of graphite drawings and complementary sketches illustrating the physical components of the weaving process. By calling attention to the beauty of the labor involved both in her own artistic processes and in the processes of the weavers, her project is a departure from the arguable inaccessibility of contemporary art due to the intellectual aura associated with it.

Briana Brightly

Briana Brightly is a PhD candidate in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research centers on the intersection of religion, art, and science in South Asia. Briana’s dissertation, “The Buddhist Craftsman: Making Images during the Golden Age of Tibetan Medicine, 1600–1800”, investigates how physicians and artists used the tools and techniques of Buddhist image-making to advance medical knowledge in early-modern Tibet. In probing the production of images, rather than their consumption, Briana hopes to open up new possibilities for how scholars imagine the “sacred” in relation to the “scientific” within the context of visual culture.

Briana’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the creation of anatomical illustrations in 17th-century Tibet. In order to visualize the human body, Tibetan artists not only observed dissected corpses but also followed a highly codified system of measurement which formed the basis of religious paintings during this period. How did they reconcile these two points of view? And what can their creative process tell us about the relationship between religion, art, and medicine in early-modern Tibet? These are some of the questions that Briana is addressing at the Men-Tsee-Khang Tibetan Medical & Astrological Institute in Dharamshala, her primary site of research.

Neha Basu

Neha Basu, a Rhode Island native, graduated from Pitzer College with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology. Her honors-level senior thesis was called “The Collection Being More than the Sum of the Parts: The Role of Identity Integration and Racialization in Multiracial Students’ Experiences”, for which she conducted a survey and interviews with multiracial college students. Neha has served as a student representative on the Faculty Executive Committee as a fellow at the Writing Center. In 2023, she was fortunate to collaborate with the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice in street vending research and policy advocacy, which sparked her interest in global street vending regulation as an intersection of various social and political factors. She has received the Kallick Community Service Award in recognition of her work in this area. In the future, Neha plans to attend law school, with the goal of becoming a movement attorney.

Street food vendors are a key part of urban life in India, yet they are excluded from the formal economy and often face restrictive regulations, making vending an interstice of sociopolitical, economic, and legal forces. These come together for street vendors in Kolkata, where such vending falls within the jurisdiction of two recently passed national- and state-level laws designed to regulate the practice. Neha’s Fulbright-Nehru project is utilizing a participatory action methodology to investigate the nature of Kolkata vendors’ interactions and navigations in terms of the law, what the local vending landscape reveals about conceptions of public space, and what it reveals about culture and economic factors.

Aditi Anand

Aditi Anand is an undergraduate student majoring in computer engineering at Purdue University. She is also pursuing a minor in biology and a concentration in artificial intelligence (AI). Aditi intends to pursue a career in healthcare and is specifically interested in applications of AI in the field of medicine. Her research has explored creating more brain-like artificial neural networks; improving the robustness of AI models used in medical imaging; and early and low-cost diagnosis of congestive heart failure. Aditi has received the Presidential Scholarship, Paul and Peggy Reising Scholarship, Stimson Family Scholarship, and Charles W. Brown Scholarship, all from Purdue University. She has also received the National Honorable Mention Award for Aspirations in Computing from the National Center for Women & Information Technology and the Sigma Xi Top STEM Talk Award at the Purdue Spring Undergraduate Research Conference. Aditi has served as a crisis intervention specialist for Mental Health America; as an emergency room volunteer at the IU Arnett Hospital, Lafayette; as vice chair of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, Purdue Student Chapter; as vice president of WorldHealth Purdue; and as event coordinator for the Indian Classical Music Association at Purdue. She has also volunteered for Udavum Karangal, Chennai, organizing personal hygiene and health awareness workshops, and for the Ankit Foundation Corp to develop a mobile app for mental health.

In her Fulbright-Nehru program, Aditi is working with the Robert Bosch Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Indian Institute of Technology (RBC-DSAI) in Chennai to develop a high-performing AI model that can be deployed in Indian clinical conditions to diagnose breast cancer through low-cost mammograms. The model that she is developing with Dr. Balaraman Ravindran’s team at RBC-DSAI seeks to overcome the challenges that India and other countries face due to lack of resources and access to radiologists.

Ria Agarwal

Ria Agarwal recently graduated from Tufts University with a double major in international relations and civic studies. Originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, her academic focus includes human rights, international law, and migration studies.

In her professional capacity, Ria worked as a legal assistant at Cambridge Immigration Law, where she prepared legal documents, conducted asylum case research, and performed community outreach. She also interned with the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, where she contributed to research and provided legal assistance for refugees.

Ria’s commitment to civic engagement is evident in her roles with Blue Future and the Asian Pacific American Public Affairs Association, where she played a key part in voter registration and AAPI advocacy efforts. Additionally, as a journalist at The Fulcrum platform, she published articles exploring voter suppression and the impact of state policies during COVID-19.

Beyond her professional endeavors, Ria is passionate about Indian classical dance, enjoys reading, and loves spending time outdoors.

Ria’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the challenges faced by Bangladeshi migrants in India who had been displaced from their country by climate-related disasters. Situated in Delhi, her research is addressing the lack of formal refugee status for these individuals, which strips them of essential protections and makes them vulnerable to exploitation. The study is assessing both Indian and international legal frameworks to evaluate their effectiveness in safeguarding the rights and well-being of climate-displaced migrants. Through legal analysis, expert interviews, and collaboration with the Migration and Asylum Project, Ria aims to generate actionable insights and influence policy discussions on migration and climate adaptation.

Abel Abraham

Abel Abraham completed his BS in mathematics and biomedical engineering from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). He will be joining the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering to pursue his PhD following his Fulbright-Nehru research period. Abel’s broad interests are in active matter and its intrinsic connections to biology. He specifically wants to understand collective behaviors and the emergence of order and organization in multicellular systems.

Abel is an experimentalist who tries to understand complex systems from the perspective of physical and mathematical principles. During his four-year degree program, while working with Prof. Pedro Saenz at UNC’s Physical Mathematics Lab, he was experimenting with vibrated fluid interfaces, particularly Faraday waves and walking droplets. His experiments with Faraday waves demonstrated similar statistical features with non-equilibrium systems at different scales, leading to a paper under review of which he is a co-author. Abel has also done experiments and simulations to show an absence of diffusion in walking droplets which is analogous to the localization of electrons in disordered potentials. This led to his first-author paper which is also under review.

In his Fulbright-Nehru program, Abel is working with Prof. Shashi Thutupalli in the Simon’s Centre for the Study of Living Machines at the National Centre for Biological Sciences. He is studying active matter systems of stronger biological connection like active droplets and polymers, and exploring how memory affects the dynamics of these active droplet and polymer systems. In this process, Abel aims to gain more experience in the space between physics and biology, which is where he will continue working during his PhD.