Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program Archives - Page 2 of 23

Aditi Mishra

Kristen Miller

Kristen Miller is a religious studies PhD candidate at Arizona State University, from where she has a master’s degree. Her research focuses on contemporary religion in northern India using an interdisciplinary approach that combines historical and ethnographic methods. She has presented her research at national and international conferences, including the American Academy of Religion, on topics such as the continued influence of scolonial legacies on contemporary religious practices. Over the last four years, Kristen has been studying Hindi and Urdu. In 2025, she participated in the American Institute of Indian Studies Summer Urdu Language Program in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. Before completing her graduate studies, she had managed several USAID-funded projects in Jordan, Sudan, and Djibouti to promote civil society and gender equality.

Kristen’s Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on dargah visitation in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh. Dargahs are grave shrines of blessed Sufi saints. Renowned dargahs often attract millions of visitors annually, both Hindus and Muslims. Kristen’s research is studying how dargahs are productive spaces of meaning-making for visitors. She is particularly interested in urban dargahs as community spaces within rapidly developing Indian cities. Drawing on ethnographic methods, Kristen is conducting participant observation and interviews with dargah visitors to explore a diversity of modes of engagement with urban religious space.

Janaki Menon

Janaki Menon is an undergraduate student at the University of South Florida (USF) pursuing a BS in public health with a minor in biology. Her academic and professional interests center on infectious disease, maternal and child health, and global health equity, with a specific focus on developing culturally grounded, community-based interventions. At the USF Morsani College of Medicine, Janaki has worked as an undergraduate research assistant in both the Ho Lab and the Mindsets in Motion Lab, where she has contributed to research at the intersection of health behavior, clinical outcomes, and patient-centered care. In a microbiology laboratory setting, she has conducted independent work identifying bacterial species, including Staphylococcus epidermidis, thereby strengthening her laboratory and analytical skills.

In addition to her research experience, Janaki has served as a certified medical assistant, gaining hands-on clinical experience and exposure to patient care. She has also interned at Meliora Health, where she worked closely with children with autism and ADHD, further deepening her understanding of developmental and behavioral health. These experiences have shaped her commitment to improving healthcare accessibility for vulnerable populations, particularly children.

Janaki’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is evaluating the cultural responsiveness and effectiveness of the Kochi Intervention for Tobacco Smoke-Free Homes (KIFT) initiative in Kerala, India. Using qualitative and community-based methods, her project is examining how cultural norms, household dynamics, and gender roles influence the adoption and sustainability of smoke-free home interventions. The study aims to identify barriers and facilitators to behavioral change and generate insights to improve culturally tailored public health strategies. Ultimately, the project seeks to strengthen the intervention’s design and contribute to reducing secondhand smoke exposure in vulnerable populations.

Anya Martin

Anya Martin is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of social science, artificial intelligence, and meteorology. She received her master’s degree in machine learning from UCLA, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in human-centered computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her work focuses on infrastructural and human factors in AI/ML applications at a time when AI/ML methods are moving outside of their traditional homes in tech companies. But in this shift and expansion, AI/ML methods are forced to reckon with “alien” infrastructures of data, compute, and trust. This is perhaps most clearly seen with meteorology, where data interoperability is founded on physical law, and where model “trust” is hotly contested given the high-stakes nature of disaster prediction. Anya is studying how these epistemologies of large-scale data interact as it is crucial for understanding where AI/ML methods succeed and fail.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Anya is examining how AI is being used to predict the weather in India. Meteorology is a physics-based “big data” science reliant on massive data and compute infrastructures to effectively model the atmosphere. This project aims to understand how these infrastructures work with the new AI/ML methods developed over the last few years, most notably the 2022–2023 AI weather models developed using (almost exclusively) tech company data and compute infrastructure. Anya’s ethnographic work to capture this crucial phase will not only inform AI transition but also provide a critical case study for the effective use of AIs.

Arushi Kende

Arushi Kende is a recent graduate from Cornell University, where she studied Asian studies and pursued research interests in seva, altruism, ecological ethics, and community-based models of care. Her work focuses on how Indian religious communities cultivate self-sustaining cultures of service, especially through practices such as free kitchens, farmer support, elder care, forest schools, and other forms of community-led relief. For her honors assignment, she conducted ethnographic fieldwork across Maharashtra and Uttarakhand, visiting 15 ashrams and seva projects to study how service is practiced as both a spiritual discipline and as a social framework.

Arushi was involved in interfaith and service initiatives at Cornell, where she was president of Hindu YUVA and an interfaith ambassador. Her community education work spans both practical and academic forms of teaching, from leading cooking and local sustainability lessons for community members to supporting elementary students in reading and high school students in essay writing. Her broader interests include sant literature, Indic educational and service traditions, ecological connection, rural sustainability, and the relationship between religion and social change. Through her scholarship and service work, she aims to build mutual exchange between India and the United States around compassionate, resilient, and regenerative forms of altruism.

Building on her earlier exploratory fieldwork, Arushi’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining seva not simply as “selfless service,” but as a cultivated moral and social form. Through sustained ethnographic research among selected religious communities in Maharashtra, she is studying how seva is reproduced through discipline, storytelling, communal labor, devotional practice, institutional life, and personal narrative. The project is delving into how sevaks negotiate self-effacement and agency, how communities sustain non-market obligations without reducing service to debt or patronage, and how recipients interpret care as charity, grace, kinship, reciprocity, or participation in a shared moral world.

Sivani Manimaran

Sivani Manimaran is a graduate of the University of Michigan, from where she earned a BS in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology, alongside a minor in public policy, as well as a leadership certificate. She is deeply passionate about the intersection of medicine, global health, and engineering.

Sivani served as the president of Michigan Health Engineered for All Lives (M-HEAL), an over 300-member student organization of 12 project teams, each working to develop a low-cost healthcare prototype with a global partner. Sivani’s personal commitment to this mission was best reflected in her role as a colead of her own project team, M-HEAL: The Initiative. Collaborating and codesigning directly with physician partners in Kumasi, Ghana, for this project, she led the development of affordable neonatal incubator and kangaroo mother carrier prototypes. She traveled to Ghana twice to get direct feedback on the prototypes, engage with the local community, and understand cultural insights with the team members.

Beyond her research and global health initiatives, Sivani is a dedicated mentor. As a residential advisor for the Michigan Research and Discovery Scholars (MRADS), she has supported students to adjust to college and start research. Her experiences in M-HEAL, research, and mentorship have served as a catalyst for her passion to advance, advocate, and develop solutions with global communities.

To address the persistent challenges of babies with low birth weight in India, Sivani’s Fulbright-Nehru project is leading a mixed-methods study to improve Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) adherence. As part of the project, she is conducting a needs assessments with NICU mothers and stakeholders to identify cultural and logistical barriers to sustained care. Leveraging these insights, she will help develop a KMC training program for providers and family-inclusive sessions that extend caregiving responsibilities. Finally, Sivani will track quantitative metrics and caregiver comfort to refine such interventions. By focusing on these community-driven interventions, her project seeks to improve outcomes for preterm infants, thereby providing a scalable model for sustainable neonatal thermoregulation and long-term health in the Indian context.

Kalyani Lawrence

Kalyani Lawrence is a 2025 graduate of Tufts University, where she studied biology and environmental studies. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of medicine, public health, environmental justice, ecology, and (de)colonial studies. She is committed to producing culturally sensitive work that directly benefits the communities she engages with.

During her undergraduate years, Kalyani sought avenues to unite her interests in health and medicine with a burgeoning passion for environmental justice. She became involved in local and global environmental health initiatives, leading a Human and Environmental Health team at the Tufts Office of Sustainability and performing research for the NGO 1for3 which contributed to the development of food sovereignty and Well Child Health programs in a West Bank refugee camp.

Kalyani has accumulated over 5,000 hours of clinical experience ranging from emergency medicine in Boston to reconstructive surgery and rural medicine in Maharashtra. Through these stints, she has become intent on bringing an approach to healthcare that is culturally relevant, based on justice, and grounded in systems thinking.

Kalyani’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is focusing on Adivasi subsistence farmers in a drought-prone region of Maharashtra. Recognizing that shifting environmental and sociocultural pressures influence the conditions required to sustain health, and that such changes produce complexities difficult to capture in medicalized frameworks, her work is exploring the ways that this community understands and relates environmental changes to their health and well-being. Her research is following a community-focused approach in an attempt to better represent the nuances of local realities. This project aspires to contribute to the preservation and elevation of local knowledge, support advocacy efforts, and provide context-specific data which can inform action.

Lara Lashus

Lara Lashus graduated from Trinity University with a BA in sociology and international studies (global health), and a concentration in gender and sexuality studies. Her interdisciplinary work focused on identity construction and relationships between gender, health, illness, and postcolonial development. In her senior year, she won the C. Wright Mills Award for outstanding achievement in sociology. She also earned departmental honors for her published thesis, “Hijra Subjectivity, Gender Aﬃrmative Care, and the Will to Verify: A Case Study in Confirmation Desire”. The thesis, using a post-structuralist lens, investigates how colonial and state capture of the hijra identity produced arenas of suspicion and verification, thereby shaping questions of safety, authority, and authenticity for the hijra amidst new medical and socio-legal developments. This work was based on the qualitative research she conducted while studying abroad in India during her junior year. Additionally, she has studied in Paraguay, where she worked to uplift the political and environmental rights of the indigenous Guaraní. She has also researched family planning access in the rural parts of eastern Uganda through a Yale fellowship program, and is a co-author of its findings published in Health & Place.

Lara is passionate about fighting for the dignified and equitable treatment of all. She has worked closely with local organizers to collaborate with student activists, leading coalitions for reproductive justice, and as a harm reduction intern serving the impoverished and unhoused communities of San Antonio. She won grants such as the John Donahue Award for Social Justice to complete this work. For the past four years, she has been working as a research assistant to sociology professors Dr. Amanda Hernandez and Dr. Amy Stone on various projects, primarily analyzing LGBTQ youth experiences.

With her Fulbright-Nehru award, Lara is studying cultural and climatic shifts related to the business, harvest, and use of native plants for medicinal purposes in the rural Himalayan regions. Her research is also seeking answers to how diﬀerent practitioners perceive and navigate cultural barriers to care in these regions, given the shifting structural and environmental constraints. Further, she is studying the role of herbal medicine in the lives of local women and the growing market for medicinal agriculture within the international economy.

Daniel Lapinski

Daniel Lapinski is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He has an MA from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the history and languages of Northeast India, with an emphasis on the development of modern Manipur and on Meitei linguistics and literature.

Daniel’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the linguistics and language politics in Manipur during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is investigating how various actors (academics, officials, artists) conceptualized and presented the Meitei (or Manipuri) language at different historical moments and how these framings influenced its current position within the linguistic and political landscape of India. By tracing this discourse through the institutions and intellectual products of colonial and postcolonial India, the project seeks to elucidate the concerns and material factors that have helped shape Manipur, and the Northeast more generally, as a sociocultural space.