USA Fellows Year: U.S. Fellows 2025-2026

Jared Mazzanti

Mr. Jared Mazzanti currently serves as the director of Strategic Initiatives in the Dean’s Office at the University of California (UC), Berkeley School of Public Health, where he has designed and operationalized multiple programs focused on health innovation internationally and domestically. He spearheads a novel partnership with J.P. Morgan that brought a new healthcare conference to Asia, oversees a Health Innovation Accelerator for Taiwanese start-ups, and previously built a Social Impact Innovation Grant Program to provide student teams resources and training to effect positive change in their communities.

A Boren scholarship to China in 2009 ignited Mr. Mazzanti’s lifelong drive to build bridges between peoples and cultures, especially in Asia. He has launched and sustained multi-country partnerships in his previous roles at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, UC Berkeley’s Office of the Chancellor, and the HNA Group in China.

Mr. Mazzanti received his BA in political economy with the distinction of magna cum laude from UC, where he concentrated in East Asia and minored in Chinese. He received his MBA in 2016 after completing a Chinese-taught program at Central South University (中南大学) in China’s Hunan province. He is an active member of UC Berkeley’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Council, regularly volunteers for the Asia Society of Northern California, and maintains professional credentials in HR and project management.

Mr. Mazzanti’s Fulbright project is conducting a comparative analysis on how universities in India (Indian Institute of Science), Japan (Tohoku University), and South Korea (Seoul National University) are bridging the gap between invention and innovation, especially in health-related deep tech; this is to identify success stories and pain points, the latter preventing faster uptake of university research by industry. His research aims to answer one key question through surveys and stakeholder interviews: what factors best position a university to integrate into local and national innovation ecosystems and drive entrepreneurship among its faculty, students, staff, and alumni?

Kristian Dambrino

Dr. Kristian Dambrino is an ANCC board-certified psychiatric nurse practitioner and founder of Dambrino Wellness, an evidence-based outpatient mental health clinic in Nashville, Tennessee. During her Doctor of Nursing Practice program, she studied the impact of high-deductible health insurance on mental health treatment through a retrospective analysis, exploring how cost transparency between the provider and patient can mitigate financial decision-making for patients accessing psychiatric care.

As a national speaker and psychopharmacology expert, Dr. Dambrino regularly delivers continuing medical education programs for Psych Congress, HMP Global, and conferences across the United States. Her academic contributions include authoring accredited graduate nursing courses in psychopharmacology, guest lecturing at Vanderbilt University, and holding adjunct appointments at Michigan State University and Marian University.

Dr. Dambrino is the creator of The Limbic Music, an R&B musical about neurotransmitters in mental health, which is currently in pre-production. She has also authored a masterclass in jazz vocal improvisation, delivering the six-hour curriculum completely in French in Caen, France, in May 2023. An accomplished vocalist, she performs at annual jazz concerts in France and has shared stages with Oprah Winfrey, Morgan Freeman, Jean Smart, Samuel L. Jackson, and Ray Romano. She has also been featured on U.S. national television – MSNBC, CNBC, and CMT – as an entertainer, and has released three original jazz albums, one of which was awarded the 2017 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award for Best Contemporary Music Composition.

Committed to service, Dr. Dambrino volunteers regularly with Rotary International, Project C.U.R.E., Habitat for Humanity, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and the Nashville International Center for Empowerment. Recently, she produced a sold-out benefit concert, Music City Without Borders, raising $20,000 for refugee resettlement in Tennessee.

Dr. Dambrino’ s Fulbright-project is working on reducing mental health stigma among nurses and nursing students in Indonesia and India through a photovoice-enhanced intervention. Via participatory photography and workshops, the project participants are documenting and reflecting on their experiences with stigma. The goal is to strengthen mental health nursing capacity by building sustainable global partnerships.

Shouraseni Roy

Prof. Shouraseni Roy is a professor in the Department of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of Miami. Her research centers on long-term climate trends and their societal impacts, with a particular focus on the intersections of climate change, health, and gender in the Global South. Over the past two decades, she has gained national and international recognition for her contributions to climate science, which reflects in her selection as a contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

Her methodological research approach emphasizes spatial analysis using GIS, remote sensing, and climate data. She analyzes field data, satellite imagery, and both gridded and station-level data sets to identify urban heat island trends in cities like New Delhi, Belize, and Beijing. Her research has been published in leading journals like the International Journal of Climatology, Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, and Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. As a recognized expert on Indian climate, she has also contributed an entry on Monsoons to the Encyclopedia of Geography published by the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Several of her publications on long-term climate change have been cited in IPCC reports. Prof. Roy was also selected as an AAG delegate to attend the UNFCCC’s Conference of Parties (COP) meetings in Lima and Paris. Earlier, she had conducted a Fulbright study in India on the long-term impact of urbanization on groundwater levels in Delhi and Mumbai.

Besides her climate-related research, Prof. Roy has actively engaged in projects that examine urban processes using big data and geospatial analysis. Her recent work in Miami, conducted in collaboration with students and faculty, explored spatial patterns of crime, traffic accidents, and vulnerability to sea-level rise.

Prof. Roy’s Fulbright-Kalam project is documenting the localized impacts of climate change in the Sundarban Delta through comprehensive spatial analysis and fieldwork. The study is assessing shoreline changes, subsidence, and local adaptation responses in order to provide critical insights for policymakers and local communities. The results will be shared with local stakeholders and used to develop a knowledge hub dashboard for collaborations.

Susanta Behura

Dr. Susanta Behura is an assistant professor of computational biology and bioinformatics in the Division of Animal Sciences of the University of Missouri, Columbia. He has a BSc in mathematics, an MSc in biotechnology, and a PhD in life sciences. His postdoctoral training was at Purdue University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has a decade’s experience in animal health and reproduction research at the University of Missouri. His lab leverages multi-omics data using transcriptomics, epigenetics, metabolomics, proteomics, and single-cell genomics assays to perform data-intensive bioinformatics research in the areas of reproduction, development, and health.

Dr. Behura has a demonstratable track record of conducting research independently as well as collaboratively. He has published over 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals and these have been cited extensively. His current h-index is 37 and i10-index, 82. In the last five years, his lab has published several papers in Gene, Placenta, Cells, iScience, and FASEB J which have provided new insights into the role of placenta in the development of fetal brain in animals. Dr. Behura has also been actively involved in writing collaborative and independent grant proposals. At Missouri, he has developed and taught a graduate-level course, and has also mentored three graduate students and a senior research specialist.

A reviewer for many high-impact factor journals, Dr. Behura is an editorial board member of several journals such as Scientific Reports and Systems Biology in Reproductive Medicine. He has also served as a grant reviewer and panelist for agencies like the U.S. National Science Foundation, French National Research Agency, German Research Foundation, Wellcome Trust, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Israel’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Space, and Spain’s “la Caixa” Foundation.

Dr. Behura’s Fulbright-Kalam project is a combined teaching and research endeavor at Utkal University, India. His research project, called “Advancing Genomics Research and Education on Climate-resilient Animal Agriculture in India”, is studying epigenetic changes in the blood of dairy cows to understand how they cope with summer heat. The teaching component is providing students an overview of emerging applications of genomics in climate resilience research in animal agriculture.

Sankarasubramanian Arumugam

Prof. Sankarasubramanian Arumugam is a faculty at North Carolina State University. His primary research interest lies in understanding, modeling, and forecasting large-scale hydroclimate information and utilizing that information for improved food, water, energy nexus. In this context, he has developed both physical and stochastic models in hydroclimatology, as well as stochastic optimization models for incorporating climate information into water, energy and crop-water management models. He received his PhD in water resources engineering from Tufts University in 2001. After that, he worked as a postdoctoral research scientist and as associate research scientist at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society. He has also worked as a consultant for the World Bank focusing on the role of environmental impact assessment in improving development projects.

Dr. Arumugam has published more than 120 refereed articles in various top-tier journals such as Water Resources Research, Earth’s Future, and Journal of Geophysical Research. He has mentored 9 postdoctoral scientists, 21 PhD students, and 5 MS students. He has served as the lead principal investigator for various interdisciplinary flagship initiatives of the National Science Foundation (NSF) on climate and sustainability. He has received the prestigious CAREER award from NSF. Dr. Arumugam has also led an AGU Chapman International Conference on seasonal hydroclimatic predictions and water management.

He is currently serving as an associate editor with Geophysical Research Letters and has served on the editorial board of publications like Water Resources Research and Journal of Hydrology. Apart from serving on several NSF panels, he was a panelist for the NAS workshop on utilizing water-use information. He has also led several workshops for the USGS Powell Center and the World Meteorological Organization.

Dr. Arumugam’s Fulbright-Kalam project is pursuing four key research activities: developing a national assessment of Food, Water and Energy Systems (FEWS) security; synthesizing opportunities and challenges to improve FEWS resilience under near-term climate change; capacity building of agencies on state-of-the-art models in FEWS research through workshops; and training next-gen scientists through short-term courses on utilizing hydroclimatic information for improving FEWS resilience.

Yoshiko Okuyama

Dr. Yoshiko Okuyama is a full professor of Japanese studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo. Her areas of expertise include Japanese mythology, disability studies, second language acquisition, and technology-enhanced pedagogy. She is currently developing a new course on Japanese comics translation that incorporates AI literacy.

Dr. Okuyama is the author of Tōjisha Manga: Japan’s Graphic Memoirs of Brain and Mental Health (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Reframing Disability in Manga (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020), and Japanese Mythology in Film: A Semiotic Approach to Reading Japanese Film and Anime (Lexington Books, 2015).

She has received numerous grants, fellowships, and awards, including the Association for Asian Studies’ long-term research grant and a Japan Foundation research fellowship. She currently serves as a visiting scholar at Cornell University’s East Asian Studies Program and as an affiliated researcher at the Institute of Ars Vivendi, Ritsumeikan University.

Beyond academic publishing, Dr. Okuyama regularly delivers guest lectures at universities and also serves as a cultural consultant for media outlets such as the National Public Radio, National Geographic, and CNN.

Originally from Tokyo, she now resides in Hawaii. In addition to English and Japanese, she can communicate in American Sign Language. A midlife convert to long-distance running, she has completed numerous races, including full and half marathons. When not chasing publication deadlines or marathon finish lines, she enjoys experimenting with vegetarian recipes which are (mostly) well received by her husband and son.

Dr. Okuyama’s Fulbright-Nehru project involves teaching a course on Japanese mythology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, focusing on film analysis and exploring possible intersections of Japanese mythology with Indian traditions. Using semiotics as a framework, she is helping students explore how myths shape cultural narratives in both Japan and India. The project aims to deepen cross-cultural understanding and enrich the academic discourse on comparative mythology. The results of the research will be disseminated through lectures, conferences, and publications in order to foster future collaborations between Dr. Okuyama’s home and host institutions, thereby advancing the global study of mythology.

Brinda Gaitonde Nayak

Ms. Brinda Gaitonde Nayak works remotely as a consultant writing nomination dossiers and site management plans for World Heritage Sites in India while being based in USA. She is also the co-founder of The Bombay Heritage Walks, an organization that undertakes architectural walking tours in Mumbai. She holds a master’s in architectural conservation from Sir J.J. College of Architecture and a bachelor’s from the Academy of Architecture, both in Mumbai. After staying away from architecture for several years, Ms. Nayak decided to relearn the profession by completing the George Mason University’s graduate certificate program in digital history, which was where her vision for the Practical Preservation Series took shape. She has written several articles, co-authored papers and other publications, as well as written a book of historical fiction titled The Path. She is currently pursuing her PhD in conservation studies from the University of York, UK.

Ms. Nayak has won several prestigious grants that include the Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship, library research grants from Getty Foundation and Duke University, and has also received the National Diversity Scholar award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Besides, her work on restoring buildings in India have won several UNESCO Asia-Pacific awards.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Nayak, who also teaches an undergraduate elective course, Conservation Basics, in a hybrid format at the Academy of Architecture, Mumbai, is developing this course for broader applicability in other areas in India to promote greater involvement of emerging professionals in the field of historic preservation. The course is also introducing to the students current digital tools in documentation and preservation.

Emily Yang

Ms. Emily Yang is a Brooklyn-based artist, educator, and researcher. She holds a master’s degree in design engineering from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) and teaches at the New School’s Parsons School of Design in New York City. Ms. Yang’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Yale School of Architecture, the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition in London, and the Harvard GSD Kirkland Gallery. She completed block print and ceramic residencies from the Penland School of Craft, the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts. Her academic and professional interests center on preserving historical craft knowledge as a means of navigating uncertain futures of labor, and fostering cross-cultural exchange through participatory design. Her work has been published and presented at design education conferences, and she continues to develop experimental methods that integrate traditional craft with contemporary design research.

Ms. Yang’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring Indian block printing as both a cultural tradition and as a speculative design methodology. Based at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, she is collaborating with artisans and students through participatory design workshops that integrate traditional craft with design research. Her project aims to develop an innovative, culturally grounded pedagogy that preserves historical craft knowledge while imagining future roles for labor and making. By merging qualitative research with collaborative making, the project is fostering cross-cultural dialogue and expanding interdisciplinary design education rooted in care, community, and cultural sustainability.

Narayan Sahoo

Dr. Narayan Sahoo is a professor in the Department of Radiation Physics of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He received his PhD in physics from the University at Albany, New York, in 1986. He pursued postdoctoral research in physics at the University at Albany from 1986 to 1990 and then completed his medical physics fellowship from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York in 1992. He was part of the medical physics faculty of Albany Medical Center from December 1993 to August 2004. Dr. Sahoo has been with MD Anderson Cancer Center since August 2004 and at its Proton Therapy Center since March 2006. He currently serves as the chief of the Proton Therapy Physics Group. His professional interests are in the areas of radiation dosimetry, radiation biophysics, treatment planning, and quality assurance related to proton therapy. He is a co-author of more than 150 peer-reviewed publications and 10 book chapters, and has co-edited a book on proton therapy. He is an associate editor with the Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics and is also a fellow of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine and the American College of Radiology.

Proton therapy plans are sensitive to setup, range and radiobiological effectiveness uncertainties. There are many novel physical and biological processes in proton therapy that are known to reduce normal tissue damage and enhance tumor control. The aim of Dr. Sahoo’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is to explore innovative designing of robust and molecular image-guided proton therapy treatment plans to minimize the effect of uncertainties on planned dose distribution and to utilize the physical and biological advantages of proton beam dose distribution for improving therapeutic gain by increasing tumor control probability and decreasing normal tissue complication probability.

Krishna Nemali

Dr. Krishna Nemali has a PhD in horticulture with an emphasis on the physiology, sensors, and automation technology associated with greenhouse crops and their production. After his postdoctoral fellowship from the University of California Davis, he worked as a controlled environment crop scientist at Monsanto Company for nine years. Dr. Nemali joined the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Purdue University as an assistant professor in July 2016. He was tenured and promoted to the associate professor rank in July 2022. At Purdue, he is responsible for research, extension, and teaching. He specializes in controlled environment agriculture, which includes producing vegetables and ornamentals grown in greenhouses and vertical farms using hydroponic systems. He also conducts research in the area of digital sensors and IoT (Internet of Things) devices for horticultural crop production. A primary goal of his program at Purdue is to develop new technologies that improve the sustainability (increase productivity, reduce resource waste, minimize environmental impact, and increase profits) of controlled environment agriculture; the program also trains farmers in new technology. Dr. Nemali has published 34 scientific articles in high-impact journals, 19 extension materials, and eight industry articles. He has been invited to speak at multiple national and international conferences and has received several awards. Dr. Nemali is passionate about actively engaging with students and farmers and contributing to science and technology through research. He likes to travel and enjoys spicy food.

Dr. Nemali’s Fulbright-Nehru project is using digital sensors with IoT capability to address agricultural water wastage and nitrate contamination, as well as nitrous oxide emissions from excessive use of nitrogenous fertilizers. The project is being conducted at Govind Ballabh Pant University of Agriculture and Technology. As part of the project, smart sensor technology with decision support and IoT capability developed at Purdue University is being tested on greenhouse-grown floricultural crops to reduce water wastage and increase nitrogen-use efficiency. He is also conducting classes for senior-level undergraduate and postgraduate students on smart sensor technology.