USA Fellows Year: U.S. Fellows 2024-2025

Jasmeet Judge

Dr. Jasmeet Judge received her BS in physics from Stillman College, Alabama, and her MS in electrical engineering, and PhD in electrical engineering and atmospheric, oceanic, and space sciences from the University of Michigan. She is a professor in the Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department at the University of Florida, where she is also the director of the Center for Remote Sensing.

Dr. Judge’s research interests include microwave remote-sensing applications to terrestrial hydrology, crop development, and crop growth; electromagnetic models for dynamic agricultural terrains; and machine learning (ML) methods for spatio-temporal scaling and data-model fusion. For her research projects, she has received grants from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She has led many field experiments with active and passive microwave sensors to develop/improve remote sensing, crop growth, hydrology, and ML algorithms. Dr. Judge has also won NASA Group Achievement Awards for interdisciplinary field campaigns. She has over 70 journal publications, three co-authored books, and numerous conference and invited presentations to her credit.

In addition to research, Dr. Judge has been active in advocating for the protection of the EM spectrum as the past member, vice chair, and chair of the National Academies Committee on Radio Frequency. She is also a member of the American Geophysical Union and a senior member of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, where she has served in different roles on many committees for the past three decades.

Dr. Judge’s Fullbright-Kalam project is being carried out in collaboration with researchers in the Interdisciplinary Center for Water Research at the Indian Institute of Science in utilizing data from the upcoming NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission for the availability of timely soil and crop information in India. In addition, she is training the next generation of Indian scientists in microwave remote sensing.

Shalini Ayyagari

Prof. Shalini Ayyagari is an associate professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh and an ethnomusicologist who works across the fields of music in cultural contexts, South Asian studies, critical ethnography, and development studies.

Her first book, Music Resilience: Performing Manganiyar Music in the Indian Thar Desert, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2022, and is based on 15 years of ethnographic fieldwork and primary sources research. Musical Resilience is a sociocultural history and musical ethnography of the Manganiyar, a hereditary community of caste-based musicians who live in the Thar Desert on the India–Pakistan border and have maintained music within a patronage system as their livelihood for centuries. In the book, Prof. Ayyagari chronicles the ways hereditary professional musicians in South Asia continue to make a relevant living through music despite postcolonial rearrangements of traditional patronage relationships and despite economic hardships and the lure of more lucrative non-music professions.

Prof. Ayyagari was previously on the faculty at American University. Before that, she held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at Dartmouth College and a Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation/Teaching Predoctoral Fellowship at Kenyon College. She received her PhD in music with a focus on ethnomusicology from the University of California, Berkeley, where her dissertation research was partially funded by a Fulbright IIE fellowship. She completed her BA from Swarthmore College.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Ayyagari is centering the voices and music of the Manganiyar through collaboration, curation, and the archiving of their ethnographic video, audio, and written materials. She is also piecing together the archival materials (1965–2003) of the late Komal Kothari, the main cultural entrepreneur who took these musicians and their music to the world outside their villages. This archive was recently digitized at the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (ARCE). Prof. Ayyagari is also working with the Manganiyar musicians to tell their own stories through transmediated filmmaking as practice for co-authorship and collaboration.