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

Avital Datskovsky

Avital Datskovsky is a PhD student in the Anthropology Department at Syracuse University. She holds a bachelor’s degree (2013) in South Asian languages and civilizations from the University of Chicago and a master’s degree (2018) in development studies with a focus on contemporary India from SOAS University of London.

Avital’s Fulbright-Nehru project is tracing human and animal inclusion and exclusion from the Ranthambore National Park (RNP), an Indian tiger reserve, established in the 1970s as part of India’s conservation program called Project Tiger. As the park has grown substantially in terms of its tiger population and as an ecotourist destination, communities reliant on the forest for their livelihoods have been excluded from the park. Avital’s ethnographic project is considering what different responses of humans and animals to the RNP as a protected area reveal about political, social, and economic formations in the area; it is also exploring what possibilities for conservation may emerge when the impacts of Project Tiger are studied in terms of human and animal relationality.

Sadie Cowan

Sadie Cowan graduated from Boston University (BU) School of Public Health, Massachusetts, in 2024 with a master’s in public health, concentrating in global health policy. Sadie received her bachelor’s in sociology with honors from BU in 2022. She is originally from Dalton, Georgia, where her love for social sciences and public health began through experiences in electoral politics – a passion she continued for several campaign cycles in Georgia, Massachusetts, and nationally. Sadie’s social science research, among which includes a study regarding gender-affirming care for transgender inmates in the Georgia Department of Corrections Facilities, has been published by Johns Hopkins University and featured by Boston University’s Undergraduate Research Program. Her academic interests include global development, strengthening of health systems, LGBTQIA+ health, comparative health systems, and healthcare access for marginalized populations. Outside of academics, Sadie enjoys distance running, hiking, and exploring new cuisines.

Achieving the World Health Organization’s Tuberculosis (TB) Elimination Goals necessitates rapid reductions in TB incidence and mortality, particularly in India, which bears a quarter of the global burden. Aside from diagnostics, the Indian government has introduced nutritional subsidies for persons with TB through the Ni-kshay Mitra program. While the program has benefited hundreds of thousands of Indians with TB, there’s an urgent need to enhance its uptake. Sadie’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying the impact of Ni-kshay Mitra subsidies on their recipients; it is also examining the motivational factors behind donors participating in the program. Besides, the project is exploring ways in which Ni-kshay Mitra can enhance access to public-sector TB facilities.

Chandler Compton

Chandler Compton is a North Carolina native raised on his family’s farm near Chapel Hill. At Wofford College, he majored in international affairs and English, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He played on the men’s soccer team while also serving the college’s honor council and tutoring students at the library’s writing center. As a junior, he directed and hosted the college’s first-ever TEDx conference. He has also studied in Prague, Czechia.

After college, Chandler served as a logistics officer in the United States Marine Corps. Stationed at both Mount Fuji and Okinawa, Japan, his role involved leading the Marines in logistics operations and collaborating with partners across the Indo-Pacific region. His firsthand experience working in this dynamic international environment solidified his interest in international affairs and regional cooperation.

Chandler enjoys traveling to new countries, reading history, and going snowboarding whenever possible. He is a passionate supporter of the Atlanta Braves and Everton Football Club. When not following sports or being with friends, he is likely to be found at the gym or playing pick-up sports at the nearest basketball court or soccer field.

Chandler’s Fulbright-Nehru research is focusing on India’s potential leadership role in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) to strengthen Indo-Pacific supply chains. His project is identifying collaborative strategies for Quad members to build resilient multilateral supply chains in the region. Considering India’s strategic location, growing economic influence, and access to critical trade routes, Chandler argues the country is uniquely positioned to spearhead the Quad leadership in fortifying the Indo-Pacific economic infrastructure and promoting regional stability and sustainable development while mitigating the impact of disruptions in the global economy.

Melanie Cham

Melanie Cham graduated from Wesleyan University in 2024 with majors in earth and environmental science and archaeology. During her time at Wesleyan, she studied bacterial speciation and diversity with Dr. Frederick Cohan. This led to a summer research project funded by Wesleyan’s College of Integrative Sciences studying the effects of microplastics on the bacterial strains found in agricultural soils. The results of this research were presented at the 2021 Wesleyan Research in Science symposium and has been published by the American Chemical Society.

Melanie’s academic interest lies in learning more about the past. In 2021, she began research with Dr. Dana Royer in earth and environmental sciences at Wesleyan. During this study, she measured the stomatal index of red maples by simulating environmental conditions from the Eocene to the Miocene to observe how plant anatomy varies with changes in the atmosphere. In 2022, with support from the McNair Scholars Program, she began an independent project, titled “A Novel Method for Estimating Carbon Assimilation Rates from Fossil Leaves”, with Dr. Caroline Strömberg at the University of Washington. For this research, instead of using living organisms to interpret the past, she began using fossils to infer ecological responses to contemporary global warming. Melanie has presented her work at four national conferences: 2022 UCLA National McNair Conference; 2022 Geological Society of America Conference; 2023 Botanical Society of America Conference; and 2024 Mid-Continental Palaeobotanical Colloquium. She is set to begin her PhD in biology at the University of Washington in Fall 2025.

In her Fulbright-Nehru program, Melanie is conducting paleontological research with Dr. Bandana Samant at the Central University of Punjab. The goal of the project is to estimate regional atmospheric carbon dioxide levels before the mass extinction event of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (K–Pg) which occurred 66 million years ago. For this, she is using information from microscopic leaf fossils collected from the Deccan Volcanic Province (DVP) of India. This novel use of gas-exchange modeling with fossils from the DVP have the potential to strengthen the current assumptions of CO2 which are based on different proxies.

Samantha Chacko

Samantha Chacko graduated from the University of Southern California (USC) in May 2024 with a major in philosophy, politics, and law, and two minors, one in law and public policy and another in opera. It was through her interdisciplinary coursework that Samantha discovered her passion for law. During her sophomore year, she spent a semester interning with the Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project, where she picked up an interest in advocacy. Inspired by Esperanza’s mission, she spent the following year with JusticeCorps, an AmeriCorps program that provides legal assistance to self-representing litigants. Her research experience includes a summer at Cambridge University comparing the legal aid frameworks of the U.S., India, and the UK. Samantha spent her senior year with USC’s Center for Political Future, conducting multiple public policy research projects addressing political polarization and LA’s housing crisis. She intends to build on these experiences and skills through her Fulbright program. Ultimately, she hopes to attend law school and continue her work in increasing access to legal aid. Samantha held several leadership positions on campus, including being the student ambassador for the Thornton School of Music. She was also elected director of Mehfil for her South Asian fusion a cappella team, Asli Baat. Outside of studies, Samantha enjoys singing and watching Bollywood movies.

Although Indian citizens are constitutionally guaranteed access to legal aid, in the year 2023 only 61 per cent of those seeking legal assistance actually received it. While little research has categorized the access to these services by demographic, one report from 2016 found that only 14 per cent of all litigants in India were women. However, it remains unclear whether women actually receive the legal assistance they are entitled to and if they do, whether the quality of the service is of the required standard. Samantha’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is identifying the factors perpetuating the gender gap in access to Indian courts and thus attempting to inform the universal development of legal aid frameworks.

Natalie Callahan

Natalie Callahan graduated from Chatham University in 2023 with a degree in arts management and a degree in international studies. She also has a certificate in women’s leadership from the university. Natalie is particularly interested in matters of arts accessibility and community engagement in the arts. She loves to work with members of the public, especially in ways that help to excite them about the arts and encourage them to feel as though they are a part of the artistic community. She has explored many ways to increase arts exposure that go beyond traditional arts institutions. As the arts editor of her university’s literary magazine, she experimented with the idea of free, printed art through her curation of artists’ work in the magazine. She also explored how other media such as posters and stickers interacted with the university’s micro community. Besides, Natalie co-founded a fashion club on campus, framing fashion as the ultimate form of accessible art because, after all, everybody wears clothes. The fashion club offered affordable ways to create wearable items, funded trips to fashion history exhibitions, and contributed to the success of a campus-wide Sustainable Fashion Fair clothing swap. Following her graduation, Natalie worked at the Pittsburgh Glass Center, an arts nonprofit of the city. Here, she was able to engage in the many different glass art-making processes (including blown glass, flameworked glass, and fused glass) while helping the center carry out its mission of public access education and community building.

In her Fulbright-Nehru program, Natalie is creating a body of work emphasizing the beauty of the physical labor and skill involved in the Banarasi weaving process and, by extension, in art-making in general. She is creating a series of graphite drawings and complementary sketches illustrating the physical components of the weaving process. By calling attention to the beauty of the labor involved both in her own artistic processes and in the processes of the weavers, her project is a departure from the arguable inaccessibility of contemporary art due to the intellectual aura associated with it.

Briana Brightly

Briana Brightly is a PhD candidate in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research centers on the intersection of religion, art, and science in South Asia. Briana’s dissertation, “The Buddhist Craftsman: Making Images during the Golden Age of Tibetan Medicine, 1600–1800”, investigates how physicians and artists used the tools and techniques of Buddhist image-making to advance medical knowledge in early-modern Tibet. In probing the production of images, rather than their consumption, Briana hopes to open up new possibilities for how scholars imagine the “sacred” in relation to the “scientific” within the context of visual culture.

Briana’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the creation of anatomical illustrations in 17th-century Tibet. In order to visualize the human body, Tibetan artists not only observed dissected corpses but also followed a highly codified system of measurement which formed the basis of religious paintings during this period. How did they reconcile these two points of view? And what can their creative process tell us about the relationship between religion, art, and medicine in early-modern Tibet? These are some of the questions that Briana is addressing at the Men-Tsee-Khang Tibetan Medical & Astrological Institute in Dharamshala, her primary site of research.

Neha Basu

Neha Basu, a Rhode Island native, graduated from Pitzer College with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology. Her honors-level senior thesis was called “The Collection Being More than the Sum of the Parts: The Role of Identity Integration and Racialization in Multiracial Students’ Experiences”, for which she conducted a survey and interviews with multiracial college students. Neha has served as a student representative on the Faculty Executive Committee as a fellow at the Writing Center. In 2023, she was fortunate to collaborate with the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice in street vending research and policy advocacy, which sparked her interest in global street vending regulation as an intersection of various social and political factors. She has received the Kallick Community Service Award in recognition of her work in this area. In the future, Neha plans to attend law school, with the goal of becoming a movement attorney.

Street food vendors are a key part of urban life in India, yet they are excluded from the formal economy and often face restrictive regulations, making vending an interstice of sociopolitical, economic, and legal forces. These come together for street vendors in Kolkata, where such vending falls within the jurisdiction of two recently passed national- and state-level laws designed to regulate the practice. Neha’s Fulbright-Nehru project is utilizing a participatory action methodology to investigate the nature of Kolkata vendors’ interactions and navigations in terms of the law, what the local vending landscape reveals about conceptions of public space, and what it reveals about culture and economic factors.

Aditi Anand

Aditi Anand is an undergraduate student majoring in computer engineering at Purdue University. She is also pursuing a minor in biology and a concentration in artificial intelligence (AI). Aditi intends to pursue a career in healthcare and is specifically interested in applications of AI in the field of medicine. Her research has explored creating more brain-like artificial neural networks; improving the robustness of AI models used in medical imaging; and early and low-cost diagnosis of congestive heart failure. Aditi has received the Presidential Scholarship, Paul and Peggy Reising Scholarship, Stimson Family Scholarship, and Charles W. Brown Scholarship, all from Purdue University. She has also received the National Honorable Mention Award for Aspirations in Computing from the National Center for Women & Information Technology and the Sigma Xi Top STEM Talk Award at the Purdue Spring Undergraduate Research Conference. Aditi has served as a crisis intervention specialist for Mental Health America; as an emergency room volunteer at the IU Arnett Hospital, Lafayette; as vice chair of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, Purdue Student Chapter; as vice president of WorldHealth Purdue; and as event coordinator for the Indian Classical Music Association at Purdue. She has also volunteered for Udavum Karangal, Chennai, organizing personal hygiene and health awareness workshops, and for the Ankit Foundation Corp to develop a mobile app for mental health.

In her Fulbright-Nehru program, Aditi is working with the Robert Bosch Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Indian Institute of Technology (RBC-DSAI) in Chennai to develop a high-performing AI model that can be deployed in Indian clinical conditions to diagnose breast cancer through low-cost mammograms. The model that she is developing with Dr. Balaraman Ravindran’s team at RBC-DSAI seeks to overcome the challenges that India and other countries face due to lack of resources and access to radiologists.

Ria Agarwal

Ria Agarwal recently graduated from Tufts University with a double major in international relations and civic studies. Originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, her academic focus includes human rights, international law, and migration studies.

In her professional capacity, Ria worked as a legal assistant at Cambridge Immigration Law, where she prepared legal documents, conducted asylum case research, and performed community outreach. She also interned with the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, where she contributed to research and provided legal assistance for refugees.

Ria’s commitment to civic engagement is evident in her roles with Blue Future and the Asian Pacific American Public Affairs Association, where she played a key part in voter registration and AAPI advocacy efforts. Additionally, as a journalist at The Fulcrum platform, she published articles exploring voter suppression and the impact of state policies during COVID-19.

Beyond her professional endeavors, Ria is passionate about Indian classical dance, enjoys reading, and loves spending time outdoors.

Ria’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the challenges faced by Bangladeshi migrants in India who had been displaced from their country by climate-related disasters. Situated in Delhi, her research is addressing the lack of formal refugee status for these individuals, which strips them of essential protections and makes them vulnerable to exploitation. The study is assessing both Indian and international legal frameworks to evaluate their effectiveness in safeguarding the rights and well-being of climate-displaced migrants. Through legal analysis, expert interviews, and collaboration with the Migration and Asylum Project, Ria aims to generate actionable insights and influence policy discussions on migration and climate adaptation.