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

Isha Padhye

Isha Padhye has a BA in public policy from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. At UNC, she served in various roles in Student Government. Her senior honors thesis was on misinformation. Most recently, she worked as a research associate at the University of Chicago, helping in projects focused on U.S. healthcare policy. Isha was also a U.S. Global Health Corps Fellow from June 2023–May 2024. Her research interests lie in universal healthcare coverage, women’s health, and youth empowerment.

Isha’s Fulbright-Nehru study, based in Mumbai, is evaluating the impact of community health workers, known as Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs), on menstrual education among the youth in India. It is examining how ASHAs are serving as a resource to menstruating girls and how they are educating these girls. For this, Isha is conducting in-depth interviews with girls between the ages of 13–18 and with ASHA focus groups. This research hopes to make a significant contribution to the growing field of menstrual health management.

David Monteserin Narayana

David Narayana is a PhD candidate in religious studies at Stanford University, working on South Asian religions and specializing in the history and practice of Śaivism. Born and raised in Spain, David began his undergraduate study of philosophy at the University of Oviedo (Spain, 2013) and he later received his BA in philosophy, summa cum laude, from the University of Massachusetts Boston (2017), completing two minors in both religious and South Asian studies. He then earned an MA in religion, with a concentration in Asian religions, from Yale Divinity School (2020).

David is a certified yoga instructor with teaching experience in Spain, India, and the U.S. He has also worked as a Spanish language teacher, interpreter, and translator. His interests lie in the fields of Indian and comparative philosophy, Sanskrit and Tamil literature, and yogic and tantric traditions (Hindu and Buddhist).

David’s Fulbright-Nehru project is telling the story of how a famous Hindu deity came to be worshiped in the form of empty space in a medieval South Indian temple. While the temple town of Chidambaram has been receiving considerable scholarly attention in the last decades, much of it has centered around the figure of Naṭarāja, the dancing Śiva. However, very little has been said about how Śiva came to be revered as space. David’s research is attempting to fill this gap by unearthing forgotten and unstudied texts in Sanskrit and Tamil that may provide a history for this belief and practice.

Kaya Mallick

Kaya Mallick is an anthropologist of religion who studies the interrelation between yoga and gender. She holds an MA in South Asia studies from the University of Washington, where she was a two-time Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellow in Hindi/ Urdu. She is also a 200-hour Registered Yoga Teacher (200-RYT) and creator of The Woke Yogi, a yoga lifestyle blog. Kaya’s scholarship largely centers around female practitioners of the Hindu ascetic traditions of yoga and tantra, but she is also currently researching the role of yoga in hyper-masculine nationalist iconographies.

Kaya is a devout scholar, teacher, and practitioner of yoga who spends much of her free time on her mat. She has been teaching vinyasa and yin-style yoga for six years, and her classes seek to integrate the psychosomatic practice of modern postural yoga with the tradition’s rich philosophical lineage.

Before discovering yoga, Kaya was primarily a playwright whose plays were staged across the U.S. and India. While earning her BFA, she discovered an inherent theatricality in the Hindu mythological texts and thus she began weaving their tales into her own. The resulting research ultimately inspired her transition from dramaturgy to sociocultural anthropology. However, despite her disciplinary shift, Kaya continues to tell stories – on the stage and in the yoga studio.

With the Fulbright-Nehru research grant, Kaya is conducting an ethnography of Hindu women who lead ascetic lifestyles (sādhvīs/saṃnyāsasinīs/yoginīs). Through participant observations and interviews, she is studying how and why Hindu women practice asceticism in uniquely gendered ways and how their ascetic practices impact their lives both materially and metaphysically.

Aleksandr Kuzmenchuk

Alek Kuzmenchuk is a recent graduate of William & Mary, where he studied international relations and data science. He graduated summa cum laude and as a member of the oldest honor society in the United States, Phi Beta Kappa. His mother was born in Vadodara, India, and his father in Belarus. He is passionate about international affairs and public service and has completed internships at the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Global Research Institute, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and geoLab. He was also the editor-in-chief of William & Mary’s journal of international studies, The Monitor. As part of the Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship program, Alek spent the summer of 2023 studying Hindi in Jaipur. His research interests include Indian politics, Eastern European civic space, nuclear diplomacy, political behavior, and the role of ideology in international relations. In college, he was also a member and captain of the Division I gymnastics team. His recognitions include the NCAA Elite 90 Award, the Omicron Delta Kappa National Leader of the Year Award, the William & Mary Cypher Award, and the William & Mary Peel Hawthorne Award.

In his Fulbright-Nehru project, Alek is analyzing the records of India’s second president, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, to gain an understanding of India’s civilizational ethos through the lenses of political philosophy and religious ethics. Dr. Radhakrishnan’s body of work combines insights about the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism and its application to state building. Using that understanding, Alek, while working with researchers in the Department of International Relations at Ashoka University, is conducting conversational interviews with New Delhi residents and those from the surrounding area, as well as with those working in government, to understand how these insights are reflected in modern India.

Sandhya Kumar

Sandhya Kumar received an MPH in health policy with a concentration in global health from the Yale School of Public Health in May 2024. She was part of the accelerated five-year BA/MPH program and received her bachelor’s degree in global affairs and global health from Yale College. She grew up in Rochester, Minnesota.

At Yale, Sandhya volunteered with the Neighborhood Health Project in New Haven to provide free blood pressure and blood sugar screening at a food pantry and also led a summer international relations and leadership institute for high schoolers; she was also co-president of the South Asian Society.

Sandhya has interned with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau on Population, Refugees, and Migration in Washington, D.C., working on initiatives related to sexual and reproductive health. She has also interned with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance in Geneva, where she worked on routine immunization projects.

Sandhya’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying the sexual and reproductive health of women migrants in Mumbai. The existing studies on COVID-19’s impact on India have overlooked the gendered effects of pandemic-fueled migration, notably in the area of sexual and reproductive health (SRH). Sandhya’s project is assessing women migrants’ access to SRH services, including to sexually transmitted infection screenings, family planning, and maternal care. In this context, she is engaging with local organizations that assist Mumbai’s migrant workers, interviewing women migrants, and understanding state and local government responses.

Anushka Kulkarni

Anushka Kulkarni is a PhD candidate in musicology at UC Davis. She holds a bachelor’s degree in music in vocal performance and music history from the University of Delaware. Her primary research interests are in 18th-century opera, Rabindra Sangeet, and postcolonial studies. Her dissertation, “The Empire Sings Back: Operatic Histories of British-Indian Colonial Encounter”, engages in a transnational study of both European opera and Bengali musical drama, and their intersections with the empire. Anushka’s research has been supported by the UC Davis Dean’s Graduate Summer Fellowship. In 2023, she was the recipient of a Critical Language Scholarship.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Anushka is conducting archival work at the National Library, the West Bengal State Archives, and Asiatic Society, all situated in Kolkata, as well as at the Rabindra Bhavan Library and Archives in Santiniketan. This archival research will contribute to her dissertation on opera and British-Indian colonial encounter in 19th- and 20th-century Calcutta. Her work is also examining the complex and often contradictory representations of coloniality in musical drama. Besides, she is accessing primary source material on the presence and reception of Italian opera in 19th-century Calcutta as well as on the musical drama, or gitinatya, of the Bengali polymath, Rabindranath Tagore.

Anna Kozan

Anna Kozan is graduating in May 2024 with a BS in nursing and a BA in Spanish language studies from Ramapo College of New Jersey (RCNJ). In her Spanish studies program, she conducted research on the intersection of language and health, and the potentially detrimental outcomes that can occur when patients speak a different language from their care providers. In 2023, she completed a Critical Language Scholarship (CLS), Spark, to study Russian. She is now volunteering as a CLS alumni ambassador and advertising the program through social media and by hosting events. She has been working as a patient care technician at a hospital in New Jersey since October 2022 and developing her clinical skills to help her in her career as a nurse. Anna also works as a Spanish tutor at Ramapo College. Besides, she is the social media chair of the RCNJ Spanish Club. She is also a member of the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing and of the Sigma Delta Pi National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society. Anna is fluent in Spanish and holds an intermediate mid-proficiency in Russian, as well as a novice high proficiency in Arabic and the American Sign Language. She is also a choreographer and performer for the RCNJ Dance Company.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Anna is researching if language barriers in India’s Karnataka state is affecting patient care, health literacy, and health outcomes. Working with Dr. Archana Siddaiah at St. John’s Medical College in Bengaluru, she is interviewing healthcare workers at the college to determine their experiences with language barriers and patient care. She is also interviewing patients to find out whether they are experiencing problems in care due to language barriers. The goal of the project is to implement community-based solutions for the issues that are identified.

Harini Kannan

Harini Kannan is a student at Harvard University, graduating in Spring 2024 with a BS in mechanical engineering. Her interests lie at the intersection of engineering and medicine, with a specific emphasis on pediatrics and neurodevelopment. This is driven by her research in the following areas: development of robotic wearable systems for rehabilitation; assessing early mobility in global hospitals; volunteer work with underprivileged children in Cambridge and Boston communities; and organizing recreational programs for children with disabilities. She hopes to pursue a career in medicine and develop medical devices to help pediatric populations.

Harini’s Fulbright-Nehru project is building upon her experience working with children with cortical visual impairment (CVI) where it is difficult to identify its symptoms when it’s present alongside autism. For her research, she is working with the Low Vision Center at Aravind Eye Institute, Madurai, to develop the first autism-standardized CVI diagnostic tool and implement it. Using the currently administered assessments, she is identifying the visual skill impairments with the highest correspondence to a CVI diagnosis. She is also developing an app in the form of a mobile game to act as at-home visual rehabilitation to improve visual abilities that are impacted by CVI.

Mohnish Judge

Mohnish Judge is a Tibetan Indian American graduate of Oregon State University with a major in economics and minors in religious studies and linguistics. He is interested in the intersections of language, cultural identity, and political advocacy. As an undergraduate, he conducted research on Tibetan honorifics as part of his honors thesis, founded and led the Himalayan Student Association on his campus, and worked to provide low-income housing in his community.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Mohnish is investigating the mechanisms through which media functions, connects, and interacts with the Tibetan diaspora communities. Using a linguistic and communicative lens, he is examining the production and consumption of the media created by the Tibetan government-in-exile by conducting interviews and surveys, and through discursive and rhetorical analyses. The aim is to contribute to the current scholarship surrounding media, diaspora studies, imperialism, and cultural preservation.

Isabel Huesa

Isabel Huesa graduated summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis with a BA in anthropology, global health, and the environment, and minors in biology and South Asian languages and cultures. She wrote her senior honors thesis on the history of fossil fuel divestment campaigns at higher education institutions. A proud alumna of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Isabel’s interests lie at the intersection of social justice, the environment, and health disparities. She dedicated her undergraduate career to understanding disease impact and harm reduction in marginalized communities; expanding student mental healthcare access; fighting for social justice; and examining Washington University’s role within the greater St. Louis. An advocate at heart, Isabel has mentored students as a mental health peer counselor, advised university leadership as the undergraduate representative to WashU’s Board of Trustees, and – in the wake of Missouri’s statewide abortion ban – led outreach efforts for Planned Parenthood. A critical language scholar, Isabel spent over six years learning Hindi. As a climate justice advocate, Isa participated in the United Nations’ 28th Conference of the Parties and also worked as a student consultant in the Interdisciplinary Environmental Law Clinic at WashU Law.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Isabel is in Delhi studying mental telehealth interventions in the HIV care continuum. She is evaluating and analyzing the efficacy of the existing 24/7 NACP (National AIDS Control Program) phone counseling service by examining the frequency of use by MSM (Men Who Have Sex with Men), the perceived effects of the phone counseling, and the patterns of HIV transmission and treatment in Delhi among MSM before and after such counseling.