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

Vincent DeLaurentis

Vincent DeLaurentis is a critical urban geographer in the Earth and Environmental Sciences program at the CUNY Graduate Center. He graduated with a BS in foreign service from Georgetown University in 2017. Before beginning his PhD program, Vincent worked as the director of outreach at the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent labor rights monitor focused on the apparel industry. At the same time, he developed popular education materials, and also organized tenants through the nonprofit One DC – Organizing Neighborhood Equity.

He studied and researched in Chandigarh for over a decade through two Provost’s Pre-Dissertation Summer Research grants (2025 and 2026), two Critical Languages scholarships (2015 and 2017), and an American Institute of Indian Studies/U.S. Department of Education fellowship (2025). Vincent has presented his research at several platforms: an annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers; a Global Labor University conference; an international conference of Critical Geography; and an annual conference of the journal Historical Materialism. His writing on labor and urban space can be found in ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, New Labor Forum, and the Washington Post. Vincent also practices film photography and the sitar.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Vincent is studying the ways in which visions of modernity and efforts to create a slum-free city underscore a fundamental friction in Chandigarh’s urban transformation. While the city administration mobilizes abject labor toward Chandigarh’s expansion and maintenance, the city infrastructure neglects laborers’ social and housing needs. Through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, participatory mapping, and archival research, Vincent’s project is interrogating worker intervention in the built environment, which takes place both through sanctioned and unsanctioned processes.

Pranathi Dandu

Pranathi Dandu received both her BSPH in biostatistics and her BS in neuroscience, with a minor in chemistry, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She graduated with distinction and honors as both a Carolina Research Scholar and as a Buckley Public Service Scholar, and recently completed her MS in physiology from North Carolina State University. Her academic and research interests focus on the neural mechanisms underlying sensory processing and predictive coding, and their implications for neurological and developmental disorders, particularly autism spectrum disorder. Given her background in public health and experiences in rural India, Pranathi is interested in understanding how gaps in healthcare access and literacy can create barriers to receiving effective medical care. She is especially interested in the role cross-cultural and global health perspectives can play in shaping more accessible and equitable care.

At UNC Chapel Hill, Pranathi worked as a research assistant in Dr. Hiroyuki Kato’s lab in the Department of Psychiatry, investigating the neural circuits underlying predictive coding in the auditory cortex. Her work involved neural tracing and imaging to study how the brain filters and adapts to sensory information. During her time there, she completed an honors thesis examining topographic projections from the orbitofrontal cortex to the auditory cortex; she also coauthored publications. Outside of research, she served as a copresident for the Biostatistics Student Association and was involved with the American Mock World Health Organization as a DAIS codirector. Pranathi also cofounded SPROUT Nutrition, a community initiative focused on providing nutrition education and support for underserved families, for which she received the Robert E. Bryan Fellowship. She hopes to pursue a career as a physician dedicated to translating neuroscience research into accessible, culturally informed interventions for children with neurodevelopmental conditions.

For children with autism spectrum disorder, ordinary sounds like traffic can be overwhelming and disrupt daily life, yet effective interventions remain underdeveloped. Motivated by this gap, Pranathi’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating whether structured auditory training can improve sensory adaptation in autistic children, reducing sensory distress. Working with the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, she is developing and piloting a low-cost, tablet-based intervention and collecting neurophysiological data to assess its efficacy in reducing sensory hypersensitivity and improving adaptive functioning. The findings aim to inform scalable interventions for autism in low-resource settings while advancing our understanding of sensory processing in neurodevelopmental disorders.

Aden Cicourel

Aden Cicourel is a recent graduate of Pomona College, where he studied Middle Eastern and South Asian history. His work examines historical relationships between sound, music, and modernity. In 2025, he received the Humanities Studio Fellowship, which supported archival research in London and Mumbai for his senior thesis on jazz music in colonial Bombay. Beyond his studies, Aden played guitar in the Pomona College Jazz Ensemble, taught volunteer music lessons through the Draper Center for Community Partnerships, and helped lead the Musicians’ Coalition.

Aden’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the intertwined history of jazz and Hindustani music in the middle of the 20th century. Following India’s Independence, the increase in urbanization, proliferation of acoustic technologies, and the formation of national identity created new musical spaces for cultural exchange and connection between India and the U.S. Relying on archival research, photographs, radio broadcasts, vinyl records, oral histories, literary accounts, and concert footage, the project is uncovering how fusion genres such as raga jazz and Indo-jazz emerged from this period as nuanced symbols of fluid cosmopolitanism and national pride.

Ethan Chiu

Ethan Chiu is a BA/MPP candidate at Yale University studying history and global affairs, with a focus on semiconductor supply chains, democratic institutions, and national security. His senior thesis, “Human Circuits in Cold War Taiwan”, draws on fieldwork across eight major chip hubs and examines the migrant workers who sustain the global semiconductor industry. After his Fulbright-Nehru grant, he will return to Yale to complete his master’s in public policy thesis, which will integrate his India research with comparative findings from his prior fieldwork in Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, Arizona, and Texas.

At Yale, Ethan founded the Foreign Policy Initiative to connect underrepresented students with national security projects, co-organized the Geopolitics of Technology Forum, and manages research on China and Taiwan at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has worked on emerging technology policy at the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. His professional experience also spans RAND, the Center for a New American Security, the Brookings Institution, and the Pentagon. Ethan has coauthored reports on AI and international security, and contributed to policy memos on supply chain security. He was also a Regeneron Science Talent Search finalist for his biomedical research.

Shaped by his Taiwanese immigrant parents and a near-fatal accident, Ethan aims to build industrial and security policies that protect both democratic institutions and the workers who sustain them. He is originally from Jericho, New York, and outside of work enjoys running, managing his residential college gym, playing the saxophone, and cooking Taiwanese food with friends.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Ethan is studying the labor conditions in India’s fast-growing semiconductor assembly, testing, and packaging ecosystem. Working with Prof. Binitha Thampi at IIT Madras, he is examining how subcontracting chains, recruitment practices, dormitory housing, and occupational safety standards shape worker well-being. Building on his prior fieldwork across ten chip hubs spanning Asia, Europe, and the United States, he is applying a mixed-methods approach combining semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observation, and quantitative analysis. He will be integrating his findings into his Yale master’s thesis to inform American and Indian policy on dignified advanced manufacturing.

Driptaa Chakraborty

Driptaa Chakraborty is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, where she double-majored in architecture and mathematical sciences. She is interested in computational methodologies across design practices. She has worked as a research assistant for Dr. Lavender Tessmer at Clemson University where she helped design a computer simulation process by which knitting machines can be used as fabrication instruments to manufacture multilayer, multi-material objects that do not require human assemblage. Her work with Dr. Tessmer helped her formulate the proposal for her Fulbright project. Driptaa is also interested in analyzing computational tools from a historical and social perspective. Her senior capstone project studied, modeled, and contextualized early computational models in the development of neighborhoods in 1970s Navi Mumbai. During her time at Washington University, Driptaa received the James W. Fitzgibbon Scholarship in Architecture, which is a full tuition grant to one architecture student per graduating class, while her research was supported by the Academic Year Undergraduate Research Award.

Patan Patola, one of India’s most complex fabrication processes, is a weaving technique which first requires encoding a design onto individual yarns. Driptaa’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying Patan Patola to develop an interactive algorithmic tool for weavers. The tool will predict final Patola motifs from intermediate stages and also catch potential errors. The research will not only contribute to preserving the craft but will also help designers use such textile fabrication techniques across design practices.

Andrew Califf

Andrew Califf is an archaeologist, anthropologist, photographer, and storyteller focused on exploring, learning, and documenting how people live and thrive in dynamic environments, specifically mountains and high-elevation plateaus. A freelance photojournalist covering topics such as environmental conservation, Indigenous rights, and archaeology, Andrew also conducts archaeological research himself, exploring how hunter-gatherers first started using the high-elevation areas of Inner Asia.

During his training at New York University in both archaeology and journalism, Andrew split time between excavations and fieldwork during the summer, and writing, photography, and reporting during the rest of the year. For his anthropology honors thesis, he surveyed and mapped stone tool scatters in Mongolia’s northern taiga while also conducting ethnographic surveys and interviews within the Dukha communities who live there. During his graduate studies in archaeology, Andrew “shovel bummed” from caves in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan to mudbrick fortresses in Uzbekistan.

Andrew has bylines from six countries and was awarded the Overseas Press Club Foundation Stan Swinton Scholarship to cover conservation and Indigenous rights in Cambodia. He aims to convey the significance of actions and a deeper worldview rooted in the Indigenous knowledge of an environment. These are the ephemeral concepts he hopes to share through both visual and written storytelling, as well as scientific research. Specifically regarding his archaeological research, the significant aspect is about better understanding how Prehistoric people navigated challenging and dynamic environments like the Western Himalaya.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Andrew is conducting a specialized survey focused on identifying Prehistoric artifacts and sites in Ladakh. The process involves combining the mapping of previously discovered stone tools with modeling geomorphological features and the topography to inform targeted surveys, thereby expanding the dataset of Prehistoric archaeology in Ladakh. This data will deepen understanding about Prehistoric peoples in one of the world’s most dynamic regions, expand India’s diverse heritage, and help researchers adopt new survey strategies for finding such sites in the mountains.

Ritikraj Arya

Ritikraj Arya is a 2023 graduate of Brown University, where he majored in biology. During his time at Brown, he was an avid volunteer with Camp Kesem, a nonprofit organization that provides free summer camps for children whose parents have been diagnosed with cancer. Through this work, he helped create a supportive environment for children navigating some of life’s most difficult circumstances.

Ritikraj’s passion for working with and supporting children shaped his postgraduate work as a researcher in pediatric end-of-life care at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). At UAB, he contributed to projects funded by organizations such as the Children’s Oncology Group, the National Institutes of Health, and the American Cancer Society. His work spanned a wide range of pediatric end-of-life care initiatives, including studies evaluating novel quality measures for pediatric end-of-life care and qualitative research involving bereaved parent interviews. His experiences conducting qualitative research in end-of-life care helped shape the direction of his Fulbright project studying pediatric palliative care in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.

Outside of his academic and professional work, Ritikraj enjoys cooking, reading, and spending time with his family.

Though home to only 3 percent of India’s population, the state of Kerala delivers nearly 90 percent of the nation’s palliative services by supplementing care with the efforts of local volunteers – an approach known as the “Kerala Model” of palliative care. Partnering with Loyola College of Social Sciences and Pallium India, Ritikraj’s Fulbright-Nehru project is conducting an ethnographic study examining how this model mobilizes community volunteers to provide high-quality pediatric palliative care. Through participant observation and in-depth interviews with volunteers, parents, and others, the project aims to generate insights that can inform global efforts to expand volunteer integration in pediatric palliative care amid critical physician shortages.

Vunnathi Ankem

Vunnathi Ankem is a community-oriented researcher and student leader. She graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, with a BS in psychology. For her honors thesis project, conducted through qualitative interviewing and thematic coding under the guidance of her mentor, Dr. Christopher Murphy, she researched how the South Asian diaspora conceptualized intimate partner violence (IPV) and unhealthy relationship dynamics. She presented this research at a conference of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) in 2025 and at the 2026 National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR). She has served as a government intern where she engaged with research produced on family violence, online abuse, and child maltreatment. She was also a research assistant in the Gender-Based Harms and Abuse Prevention Lab where she worked on projects regarding the effectiveness of intervention in IPV cases, IPV amongst international graduate students, and IPV prevention strategies on college campuses.

In her free time, Vunnathi enjoys highlighting the importance of civic action and engagement. In one such campaign, she and her team of student leaders helped raise over USD 6,000 for local Baltimore charities. And, through the Maryland Y Youth and Government program, she volunteered to support teens in their journey with civic engagement. Vunnathi has tutored elementary public school students in Baltimore City to keep up their love for learning. She has also co-led an exploration of a long-term collective civic action around health and patient care equity in Baltimore City. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Vunnathi facilitated difficult conversations regarding mental health concerns, organized multiple school events for mental health awareness, conducted counseling programs, and created space for students struggling with community issues through a mental health club she started with her friend in association with Our Minds Matter. She aspires to become a clinical-community psychologist, combining her interest in collective action, love for community work, and passion for IPV prevention and mental healthcare.

Vunnathi’s Fulbright-Nehru project is about how young people in India perceive and talk about unhealthy relationship dynamics. Working with Dr. Padmaja Gadiraju at the University of Hyderabad, she is interviewing students in a semi-structured one-on-one interview format. The interviews are identifying expectations of social behavior, the role of social networks, and the social discourse around IPV to analyze cultural influences on relationship dynamics. The findings will inform future efforts to tailor culturally relevant IPV prevention and response programs for students of South Asian descent.

Claire Wulfman

Claire Wulfman holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Vermont and recently completed her master’s in public health from the University of Utah. Her academic path has been shaped by her curiosity and drive to create more equitable systems of care. As an undergraduate, she was involved in student government, biomedical research, collegiate athletics, and tutoring in writing. All through her master’s program, Claire contributed to a nationwide sleep study by coordinating participant recruitment and conducting cognitive assessments. She has served as a health educator with the Planned Parenthood’s Teen Council Program and has also been a counselor for sexual assault victims; besides, she was a community outreach assistant with the Utah Coalition Against Sexual Assault. For her practicum, Claire traveled to Peru to study family planning beliefs and behaviors.

As a community outreach officer on the Student Advisory Committee, Claire organized volunteer initiatives and policy engagement events for fellow graduate students. She has also contributed to research on sexual and reproductive health and rights in India. Her capstone project explored how gender norms affect stress and mental health among college-aged men; this built on her broader interest in social constructs of masculinity and gender-based violence. Claire’s interdisciplinary interests bridge public health, gender equity, and social justice. Her passion for addressing gender-based violence stems from her experience supporting survivors, promoting prevention, and researching the role of masculinities. Outside of academics and work, Claire finds joy in poetry, cooking, and spending time in the mountains.

Claire’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining how NGOs based in Mumbai are engaging with men and boys on the topic of public-space sexual harassment (PSH). Working with these local organizations, Claire is assessing how concepts of masculinity, gender roles, and safety are communicated and implemented. Through interviews, field observations, and policy analysis, her research aims to identify effective strategies to promote gender equity and inform future interventions to address PSH in India and beyond.

Ray Wipfli

Ray Wipfli holds a BS in molecular biophysics and biochemistry with a concentration in medicine from Yale University. In addition to his primary undergraduate degree, he received a certificate in global health studies through the selective Yale Jackson Institute’s Global Health Scholars Program. He already has over a decade of experience working in global health through his nonprofit organization, Energy in Action, which specializes in youth-targeted interventions in Uganda. Through this organization, of which he is both the founder and the chief executive officer, he has led countless public health interventions concerning sanitation and hygiene, sexual and reproductive health, and prevention of drowning. Furthermore, he has facilitated and published multiple research studies examining health knowledge and behaviors in Ugandan youth. Ray is interested in forging strong international connections to further the mission of health across the world, with a specific focus on youth and non-communicable diseases.

Ray’s Fulbright-Nehru project is to conduct an evaluation of the updated Kids and Diabetes in School (KiDS) campaign in New Delhi, India. The campaign targets the rapidly rising health and economic burden of diabetes in India, home to the world’s second highest number of diabetic patients. The research seeks to inform future health policy related to adolescents.