Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program Archives - Page 5 of 14

Alexa Burnston

Ms. Alexa Burnston graduated from Duke University in May 2022 with a Bachelor of Arts. Her self-designed (Program II) major was titled: “Understanding the Concept of Value Through the Lens of Classical Musical Traditions,” where she explored the meaning of classical music and its perceptions of value across the human experience. She is a trained opera singer who ventured into jazz and Carnatic singing during her time in college. In Spring 2022, she performed a senior distinction recital in all three music forms, completed an ethnomusicology honors thesis, and graduated Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with a 4.0 GPA, and with distinction.

While at Duke, she participated in numerous related student groups, serving as President of Small Town Records -Duke’s premier on-campus record label, serving on the student programming board (DUU), and in roles at Duke’s arts umbrella organization (duARTS), Duke’s Arts and Entertainment Alumni network (DEMAN), and the Duke in New York Arts and Media program (DiNY).

She has received numerous accolades for her work in music, including a Benenson Award in the Arts from Duke University, where she was able to begin her Carnatic and jazz training, Duke University Union’s Event of the Year Award, and received recognition for her work as a member of the CMA EDU leadership program. She has also been awarded for her opera singing.

Ms. Burnston’s passions in music span beyond her singing, and she also has direct arts administration and industry experience. She has been working in arts administration roles since the age of 16 and has worked in roles at Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Palm Beach Opera. In the music industry, she maintains an interest in classical music as well as music policy and supervision, working in roles at notable classical label Naxos of America, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and global record label Sony Music. Her experiences have prepared her to connect her research to a future career in the music industry.

Ms. Burnston’s background provides a comparative perspective for Carnatic research and will glean India-specific insights to explore the different ways to help markets and musicians. She will study in Chennai, the hub of Carnatic music, work with music students at the University of Madras, and analyze the role of arts administration in Carnatic music by working with Sabhas (music venues) and local arts administrators. Her Fulbright-Nehru research project is centered around the December season, during which Chennai hosts the largest Carnatic music festival in the world. She also aims to pursue a personal project about digital music distribution and continue Carnatic voice lessons.

Andrew Ashley

Mr. Andrew Ashley, a medical anthropologist and PhD candidate at New York University, studies how people live with diabetes and other chronic health concerns in India and among the Indian diaspora in the United States. In particular, Mr. Ashley is interested in the intersection of health, science, agriculture, and technology to see how scientists manipulate seeds themselves to provide better healthcare. Mr. Ashley’s work also provides a comparative look at living with Type II diabetes in India and in the United States. Previously, Mr. Ashley has conducted research on the possibilities and limits of multicultural governance strategies in a former mill town in northern England; the evolving cultural landscape of suburban North Carolina; and the complications and anxieties of life on student and temporary work visa for IT migrants from India to the United States. Mr. Ashley has conducted fieldwork on South Asian diasporas in northern England; The “Research Triangle” of North Carolina; Chicagoland; and New York and New Jersey metro area. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of North Carolina; a master’s degree in Geography from the University of Kentucky; and master’s degrees with a focus on Anthropology from the University of Chicago and NYU. Mr. Ashley is also a filmmaker and a recipient of the Culture and Media certificate from NYU. His most recent film Sehnsucht (2021) looks at the shifting landscape of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the effect these layers have on him. Mr. Ashley also plans to make a film during his Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, around his research.

Mr. Ashley aims to conduct his dissertation research on living with diabetes in Hyderabad. He aims to conduct ethnographic fieldwork with people diagnosed with Type I or Type II diabetes, their family members and caregivers, and doctors and other medical health professionals and researchers. Mr. Ashley seeks to also conduct ethnographic fieldwork with crop scientists and medical researchers who are working to create new forms of low Glycemic Index rice. In particular, Mr. Ashley hopes to understand how this focus on rice echoes and also shifts previous Indian agricultural development projects since Independence; and what role crop scientists feel they have in combating this diabetes epidemic.

Frances Walker

Frances Walker has a bachelor’s in anthropology (medical) from Princeton University, New Jersey, with minors in global health and health policy; gender, sex, and sexuality; and African American studies. After graduating in 2022 as a Princeton University Henry R. Labouisse ’26 Fellow, Frances worked on the ground with Humans for Humanity, an Indian NGO, on its menstrual health and wellness campaigns and projects. Her current research work is a continuation of her previous senior thesis research titled “Deconstructing Menstruation in India: From Stigma to Visibility in Non-Governmental Organizations”, on historical stigma and taboo regarding menstruation and their contemporary consequences for menstruators in India.

Prior to working and researching in India, Frances served as the assistant manager of Semicolon Bookstore in Chicago where she organized literature-based community service events benefiting hundreds of Chicago kids; she also curated speaking engagements for authors. As a student, Frances was the president of the Princeton Women’s Rugby Football Club and served on its alumni board, as well as worked as a Princeton Writing Center Fellow to help undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty with a variety of academic-writing projects. She also served as a multi-year volunteer at Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center in the emergency medicine and orthopedics departments. Frances is still an avid fan of rugby and plays it in her free time. Outside of this, she loves trekking, traveling, and trying new foods.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Frances is seeking to further understand the current shift in India towards more sustainable and eco-friendly menstruation products. For this, she is locating the key actors in the realm of sustainable menstruation in order to determine why and how these products are marketed, as well as to understand what drives these entities to create change. She is also looking into the barriers that restrict the menstruators’ ability to switch to these products, and also examining the consequences of burgeoning menstrual waste as the majority of India’s population moved to using sanitary napkins in the last 10 years.

Anya Wahal

Anya Wahal is a recent graduate of Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service where she majored in science, technology, and international affairs, and concentrated in energy and the environment. She is a Taiwanese-Indian-American researcher and activist dedicated to conserving the earth’s water resources and safeguarding the marginalized communities disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis. Beyond research, Anya has interned at the State Department, Census Bureau, Library of Congress, World Wildlife Fund, and Council on Foreign Relations.

During her time in college, Anya devoted herself to mentorship, research, and service. She was a meditation leader and first-year retreat leader, as well as a fellow at the Georgetown Women’s Alliance and a sister of the Delta Phi Epsilon professional foreign service sorority. Besides, she is a Carroll Fellow, Pelosi Scholar, and Krogh Scholar. Anya co-founded The Polling Place, a nonpartisan, youth-led nonprofit dedicated to providing information on elections nationwide, as well as of Pick It Up, an educational initiative on the Earth Challenge App that enables universities to track plastic waste. In her free time, Anya enjoys taking nature photographs, exploring new coffee shops, and visiting museums.

For her Fulbright-Nehru research project, in order to better understand how poor water quality is disproportionately impacting Indian mothers, Anya is conducting environmental anthropology and policy research in New Delhi, with the aim of answering the question: what is the relationship between the inclusion of low-income mothers in water quality policy and mothers’ lived experiences in New Delhi? Anya is combining semi-structured in-depth interviews with media analysis and participant observation to learn how mothers are discussed in relation to the water crisis; she is also investigating policies on water quality.

Vineeth Vaidyula

Vineeth Vaidyula is a graduate of the Honors College at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) where he majored in biology with a minor in chemistry. In his time at VCU, he explored his interests in public health and medically underserved populations. Passionate about refugee resettlement and immigration advocacy, Vineeth has worked with local resettlement agencies and anti-detention groups as healthcare mentor, youth tutor, public benefits assistant, and detention hotline volunteer. He has also directed the Richmond Refugee Health Partners student volunteer program, an initiative he founded to: address the unmet health advocacy needs of Richmond-based refugees; and improve the cross-cultural, person-centered-care abilities of pre-health undergraduate students at VCU. Moreover, he has served as the president of Students Together Assisting Refugees at VCU (STAR@VCU), an organization he founded which focuses on campus-wide awareness campaigns on migrant issues.

He has also been significantly involved in qualitative and quantitative research, including population-based research and wet-lab virology research. Vineeth’s long-term career goal is to be a physician-advocate, serving the culturally diverse U.S. community that raised him. After completing his Fulbright-Nehru stint, Vineeth is set to matriculate from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Vineeth’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying the Hyderabad vitiligo population using survey instruments, with a focus on investigating how social class impacts the prevalence of the condition and the quality of life of the vitiligo patients. Vineeth hopes that his research in India will help him become globally informed about the social attitudes and structural disparities associated with illness that exist within different sociocultural groups so that he can better serve the diversity of U.S. patients.

Anuka Upadhye

Anuka Upadhye is a recent graduate from George Washington University where she studied international affairs with a concentration in international environmental studies and a minor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Anuka’s research interests include gendered adaptation to climate change, and she has conducted research on agriculture and adaptation in Maharashtra, India. Professionally, she has worked on environmental issues at The White House, House of Representatives, and think tanks such as the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Center for American Progress.

Although Goa’s coastline is only 104 kilometers long, its fishing industry is considered one of the most economically and culturally significant entities of the country. However, recent studies have shown that climate change has already been affecting Goa, especially its fisheries sector. Additionally, it has been disproportionately impacting the marginalized communities. Specifically in Goa, women who work in the fishing industry experience exclusion and marginalization. As climate change-induced disruptions increase the institutional need for comprehensive adaptation plans and economic relief, the invisibility of women’s labor in this industry may exclude them from such adaptation strategies. Anuka’s Fulbright-Nehru research project aims to provide a more gender-disaggregated data on fisheries in Goa.

Caroline Troy

Caroline Troy is a recent graduate of Brown University where she earned her BSc in environmental science, with a focus on conservation science and policy. For her senior honors thesis, she researched environmental predictors of biogeographical variations in woodpecker drumming. She has interned with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s ForestGEO program, Brooklyn College’s Urban Ecology and Environment NSF REU, Morgan State University’s Patuxent Environmental & Aquatic Research Laboratory, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Brown University Herbarium.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Caroline is researching the effect of urbanization on bat diversity in South India. In this context, she is carrying out passive acoustic monitoring across undeveloped to highly urbanized bat habitat sites in and around Bengaluru. India is home to around 130 bat species. However, these remarkable mammals are threatened by habitat loss due to urbanization, logging, and agriculture. It is estimated that a quarter of the bat species in India are vulnerable or endangered. In order to create effective conservation strategies, Caroline is examining which bat species can coexist with humans in developed regions and which may be threatened without habitat preservation.

Joshua Shelton

Joshua Shelton is a doctoral candidate in the Religious Studies Department at Northwestern University where he specializes in Buddhist and critical masculinities studies. His research focuses on the phenomenological textures of religious manhood in Tibetan tantra, seeking to illuminate the inflection points between masculinity as an abstract concept and manliness as an embodied enactment. His dissertation pursues these questions by attending to the life and writings of the nineteenth-century tantric virtuoso Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé, the gun-wielding, deer-hunting, beer-drinking tantric master descended from a line of “bloodthirsty bandits” in eastern Tibet.

Joshua earned his bachelor’s in religious studies and English literature at Georgetown University where his thesis on demon possession was awarded the Theta Alpha Kappa Award for excellence in undergraduate research. After college, Joshua spent two years at the Georgetown University Law Center working on his JD degree before deciding his passion for education and social service would be better served by a career in academia and activism. Joshua continued his graduate training in Buddhist studies at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder where he received the Moore Fellowship to conduct historiographic research on tantric masculinity for his master’s in Buddhist studies. At CU, he also served as the editor-in-chief for the university’s NEXT journal. He currently serves as the coordinator for the Khyentse Foundation Buddhist Studies Lecture Series at Northwestern University.

Joshua’s Fulbright-Nehru research is attending to the life, writings, and historical context of Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé. His project emphasizes the structural roles masculinity plays as both abstract ideology and embodied practice in Tibetan religious history. Ultimately, Joshua’s thesis seeks to de-essentialize masculinity by situating it within history and alongside politics, economics, and sociology. It also emphasizes the role of non-secular Indigenous cosmology in the felt textures of religious manhood.

Nicholas Shafer

Nicholas Shafer is a current Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford and the Institute of Development Studies, where he is completing graduate courses in modern Middle Eastern studies, international development, and public policy. A former desk officer covering Yemen and the Gulf with the U.S. Agency for International Development, Nicholas has spent the past five years living and working across Europe, the Middle East, and in Washington, D.C. at the intersection of international development and foreign affairs from various vantage points, including the U.S. policy community, INGOs, and a fintech startup in London. His research principally examines the dynamics of rising powers in the international system, with a regional focus on the Middle East and Indian Ocean community. Nicholas has also written on the adoption and deployment of decentralized currencies in fragile state environments such as Lebanon.

A native of Silicon Valley and a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, with a BA in anthropology, Arabic, and public policy, Nicholas plans to continue into a career in foreign policy and public service. He is also a Boren Scholar and John Gardner Fellow; besides, he co-leads the mentorship program for the Community College Global Affairs Fellowship funded by the Gates Foundation which provides community college students with the resources and networks they need to reach their full potential in foreign affairs, public service, and the world of fellowships and scholarships.

For his Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, Nicholas is exploring the spectrum of opinions amongst Indian foreign policy actors on the utility of extra-regional alliances to achieving India’s foreign policy priorities in four key areas: energy security; food security; technology ecosystems; and national security. In a more contentious and complicated geopolitical environment, he is studying current and next-gen perspectives on alliances and approaches to foreign affairs to navigate the early 21st century. His project is also focusing explicitly on the emerging mini-lateral relationships and collaborations, including the I2U2 Group and the Quad, as well as on broader thinking within the Indian strategic planning community.