U.S. Fellows 2026-2027 Archives - Page 5 of 10

Ritikraj Arya

Ritikraj Arya is a 2023 graduate of Brown University, where he majored in biology. During his time at Brown, he was an avid volunteer with Camp Kesem, a nonprofit organization that provides free summer camps for children whose parents have been diagnosed with cancer. Through this work, he helped create a supportive environment for children navigating some of life’s most difficult circumstances.

Ritikraj’s passion for working with and supporting children shaped his postgraduate work as a researcher in pediatric end-of-life care at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). At UAB, he contributed to projects funded by organizations such as the Children’s Oncology Group, the National Institutes of Health, and the American Cancer Society. His work spanned a wide range of pediatric end-of-life care initiatives, including studies evaluating novel quality measures for pediatric end-of-life care and qualitative research involving bereaved parent interviews. His experiences conducting qualitative research in end-of-life care helped shape the direction of his Fulbright project studying pediatric palliative care in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.

Outside of his academic and professional work, Ritikraj enjoys cooking, reading, and spending time with his family.

Though home to only 3 percent of India’s population, the state of Kerala delivers nearly 90 percent of the nation’s palliative services by supplementing care with the efforts of local volunteers – an approach known as the “Kerala Model” of palliative care. Partnering with Loyola College of Social Sciences and Pallium India, Ritikraj’s Fulbright-Nehru project is conducting an ethnographic study examining how this model mobilizes community volunteers to provide high-quality pediatric palliative care. Through participant observation and in-depth interviews with volunteers, parents, and others, the project aims to generate insights that can inform global efforts to expand volunteer integration in pediatric palliative care amid critical physician shortages.

Vunnathi Ankem

Vunnathi Ankem is a community-oriented researcher and student leader. She graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, with a BS in psychology. For her honors thesis project, conducted through qualitative interviewing and thematic coding under the guidance of her mentor, Dr. Christopher Murphy, she researched how the South Asian diaspora conceptualized intimate partner violence (IPV) and unhealthy relationship dynamics. She presented this research at a conference of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) in 2025 and at the 2026 National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR). She has served as a government intern where she engaged with research produced on family violence, online abuse, and child maltreatment. She was also a research assistant in the Gender-Based Harms and Abuse Prevention Lab where she worked on projects regarding the effectiveness of intervention in IPV cases, IPV amongst international graduate students, and IPV prevention strategies on college campuses.

In her free time, Vunnathi enjoys highlighting the importance of civic action and engagement. In one such campaign, she and her team of student leaders helped raise over USD 6,000 for local Baltimore charities. And, through the Maryland Y Youth and Government program, she volunteered to support teens in their journey with civic engagement. Vunnathi has tutored elementary public school students in Baltimore City to keep up their love for learning. She has also co-led an exploration of a long-term collective civic action around health and patient care equity in Baltimore City. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Vunnathi facilitated difficult conversations regarding mental health concerns, organized multiple school events for mental health awareness, conducted counseling programs, and created space for students struggling with community issues through a mental health club she started with her friend in association with Our Minds Matter. She aspires to become a clinical-community psychologist, combining her interest in collective action, love for community work, and passion for IPV prevention and mental healthcare.

Vunnathi’s Fulbright-Nehru project is about how young people in India perceive and talk about unhealthy relationship dynamics. Working with Dr. Padmaja Gadiraju at the University of Hyderabad, she is interviewing students in a semi-structured one-on-one interview format. The interviews are identifying expectations of social behavior, the role of social networks, and the social discourse around IPV to analyze cultural influences on relationship dynamics. The findings will inform future efforts to tailor culturally relevant IPV prevention and response programs for students of South Asian descent.

Persis Naumann

Dr. Persis Naumann is a global health ethicist, educator, and social entrepreneur committed to advancing stigma-free healthcare through ethics, education, and community engagement. Originally from Chennai, India, and now based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she serves as adjunct professor in the Center for Global Health Ethics at Duquesne University. Her interdisciplinary work bridges bioethics, medical sociology, and public engagement to address health inequities, particularly those affecting women and marginalized communities. Her research focuses on infertility stigma, reproductive health, and culturally responsive healthcare, with an emphasis on ensuring that lived experiences inform policy, education, and practice.

Beyond academia, Dr. Naumann is the founder of Kelir Global and Kelir Books, literary initiatives dedicated to ethical storytelling, heritage language preservation, and community belonging. She also serves on the board of directors of the Fulbright Association India Interest Group as vice president and the Greater Pittsburgh Chapter as advocacy chair. Through her scholarship and leadership, she builds bridges across cultures while promoting concepts such as equity, dignity, and inclusion.

As a former Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Fellow, Dr. Naumann conducted empirical bioethics research in Chennai, examining the sociocultural dimensions of involuntary childlessness and infertility stigma. During that tenure, she once had the opportunity to address an audience of over 2,000 students at a women’s health conference in Chennai. After her presentation, some of the students approached her with a simple question: “Will you come to our classrooms and teach us more?” That moment inspired her current Fulbright project.

As a 2026–2027 Fulbright U.S. Scholar, Dr. Naumann is collaborating with the Department of Sociology at the University of Madras on “Advancing Medical Sociology through Ethics Education for Stigma-Free Healthcare in Tamil Nadu.” The project is integrating medical ethics into sociology education through experiential learning, interdisciplinary collaboration, and community engagement. By partnering with students, faculty, healthcare professionals, NGOs, and policymakers, she seeks to strengthen the role of sociologists in healthcare, promote culturally grounded approaches to reproductive health, and foster lasting partnerships between India and the United States. Through the project, Dr. Naumann aims to help build more compassionate, equitable, and stigma-free healthcare systems guided by her belief that “education is not just about knowledge, it is about meaningful connections, creating pathways for real-life contributions, and shaping the future workforce with dignity and hope.”

Amol Yadav

Dr. Amol Yadav is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Lampe Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of North Carolina (UNC) – Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University – with affiliations in neurosurgery and neuroscience at the UNC School of Medicine. He is a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist by training. After obtaining his PhD in biomedical engineering from Duke University under the mentorship of Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, Dr. Yadav honed his expertise through advanced postdoctoral training in neurobiology and neurosurgery at Duke. This propelled him to establish the Brain-Spine-Machine Interfaces Lab at UNC. His laboratory’s research is interdisciplinary in its approach, merging techniques and concepts from brain-machine interfaces with spinal neuromodulation to innovate in the field of neuroengineering. Dr. Yadav works closely with surgeons and clinicians to adapt new therapies tested in preclinical animal models into clinical applications for patients suffering from sensorimotor loss due to neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injury, and stroke. He is the principal investigator of several ongoing preclinical studies and clinical trials at UNC. His research efforts have been recognized with several accolades, including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the NIH K12 Early Career Investigator Award, the Duke Germinator Research Award, and the UNC Junior Faculty Development Award. In addition to leading an active research group, Dr. Yadav tutors undergraduate and graduate students at UNC on brain-machine interfaces and human physiology.

Dr. Yadav’s Fulbright-Nehru project is developing clinical protocols and tools for brain-computer interface (BCI) and neuromodulation trials for the Indian patient population, in collaboration with scientists, engineers, and clinicians at IIT Delhi and AIIMS Delhi. The expected outcomes of the project include a research protocol for BCI and neuromodulation trials for sensorimotor rehabilitation, regulatory filings, clinical metrics to evaluate musculoskeletal function, Indian context-specific computational tools and algorithms, and collaborative manuscript/grant submissions.

Rebecca Whittington

Dr. Rebecca Whittington is a scholar, literary translator, and instructor of Bangla, Tamil, and Hindi-Urdu. Her research and translation interests center on the intersections of linguistic diversity, social justice, and the environment in modern and contemporary South Asian literatures. She holds a PhD in South and Southeast Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley (2019), and an MA in TESOL from San Francisco State University (2025). Her translations include the memoir Daughter of the Agunmukha by Noorjahan Bose (Hurst, 2023), the novel Malloban by Bangla modernist writer Jibanananda Das (Penguin India, 2022), and the poetry and prose anthology Time Will Write a Song for You: Contemporary Tamil Writing from Sri Lanka (Penguin India, 2014). She is currently working on a monograph and on several translation projects from Hindi, Bangla, and Tamil.

Dr. Whittington’s Fulbright-Nehru project is producing a critical anthology of translations of Adivasi writing from eastern India, in collaboration with writer/scholar Vandana Tete. For this, she is researching Adivasi writings from Jharkhand and West Bengal, translated into Hindi and Bangla from Adivasi languages. She is also translating texts in Hindi as well as working with the authors or bilingual co-translators on works written in Adivasi languages.

Kamini Singha

Dr. Kamini Singha is a university distinguished professor and the associate dean for Research and Faculty Affairs in Earth and Society Programs at the Colorado School of Mines. A groundwater hydrologist with over 20 years of research experience, she leads one of the premier hydrogeophysics research groups in the United States. In over 130 peer-reviewed publications, her work explores the complex interactions between water, geology, and biology, specifically focusing on subsurface controls on ecohydrological function and the role of groundwater within “critical zone” systems – the vital layer of the Earth stretching from treetops to the base of aquifers. Notably, Dr. Singha’s research was the first to use geophysics to address a fundamental controversy in hydrology: the trapping of solute mass in dead-end porosity. This discovery has implications for understanding contaminant transport, self-remediation of streams, and tree water uptake.

An internationally recognized leader, Dr. Singha is a fellow of both the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the Geological Society of America (GSA). Her contributions have been honored with prestigious invitations, including as the National Groundwater Association’s Darcy Lecturer, in which capacity she gave 81 talks across the globe in 2017, and as the AGU Witherspoon Lecturer in 2022. She is also an editor with Water Resources Research.

Beyond her research, Dr. Singha is a celebrated educator committed to mentoring the next generation of scientists. She has received numerous teaching accolades, including Penn State’s George W. Atherton Award and the Dean’s Faculty Excellence Award from the Colorado School of Mines.

Dr. Singha earned her BS in geophysics from the University of Connecticut and her PhD in hydrogeology from Stanford University. Her current work in Himachal Pradesh, India, carries deep personal significance, as she is studying the landscape and orchards of her father’s family to contribute to its environmental resilience.

Prof. Singha’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to enhance apple-production resilience in Himachal Pradesh through data-driven strategies. Partnering with the historic Stokes Heritage Apple Orchards – the birthplace of commercial apple cultivation in the region – and IIT Mandi, the project is addressing the decline in productivity caused by rising temperatures and decreasing snow cover. Prof. Singha’s research is integrating new ground-based instrumentation, historical records, and remote-sensing data to model hydrologic controls like soil moisture and snowmelt. Ultimately, this initiative seeks to provide actionable insights for precision irrigation and management.

Arunima Singh

Prof. Arunima Singh is an associate professor of physics and a graduate faculty member in the Materials Science and Engineering program at Arizona State University. She received her PhD from Cornell University and held postdoctoral appointments at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Prof. Singh has received notable accolades, including the Department of Energy Early Career Research Program Award, The Mineral, Metal, and Materials Society (TMS) Young Leaders Professional Development Award, and the Department of Defense Faculty Fellowship. Her research integrates first-principles computational methods and artificial intelligence to accelerate materials discovery, synthesis, and applications, with an emphasis on understanding and controlling physical phenomena at the surfaces and interfaces of materials.

Prof. Singh’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is focusing on accelerating the discovery of quantum–semiconductor material heterostructures for the next-generation spintronic, neuromorphic, sensing, and topological devices. By combining machine learning, high-throughput first-principles simulations, and molecular beam epitaxy, the project is designing and fabricating atomically precise interfaces with controllable electronic properties. This integrated approach is expected to reveal the fundamental rules governing the complex interfaces in quantum–semiconductor heterostructures, establish advanced growth protocols through advanced synthesis methods, and lead to stable materials platforms for energy-efficient and scalable quantum technologies.

Sudev Sheth

Dr. Sudev Sheth is a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds a joint appointment in the Department of History and the Lauder Institute at the Wharton School. His research and teaching sit at the intersection of economic history, urban studies, and global business, with a particular focus on South Asia.

He received his PhD in history and South Asia studies from the University of Pennsylvania, following an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University and undergraduate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Penn, he was the Harvard-Newcomen Fellow in Business History at Harvard Business School.

Dr. Sheth is the author of Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India (Cambridge University Press, 2024), which examines how merchant families shaped political authority during a period of imperial decline. His broader body of work explores the role of business actors in shaping institutions, governance, and social life across time. His research has appeared in leading journals such as Business History Review, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, and Manuscript Studies. He has also written for public-facing platforms such as Scroll and the Wire.

At Penn, Dr. Sheth teaches courses such as “Global Business through the Humanities” and “The City Paradox: Design, Innovation, and Leadership”, which examine how ideas, markets, and institutions have shaped the modern world. His teaching has been recognized for its interdisciplinary approach and engagement with global perspectives.

Dr. Sheth’s Fulbright-Nehru project, “Ahmedabad’s Architects: Merchant Capitalism and Shaping a City across Seven Centuries”, is investigating how business communities have shaped urban development, governance, and architecture in one of India’s most dynamic cities. Drawing on archival research, oral histories, and analysis of the built environment, the project is tracing how business families developed institutions for credit, governance, and civic life which linked the city of Ahmedabad to regional and global networks. By foregrounding business-led forms of urban transformation, the study is attempting to offer new perspectives on capitalism, development, and the relationship between economic power and civic authority.

Matthew Sheridan

Mr. Matthew Sheridan is a Los Angeles-based abstract artist who is constantly learning from global philosophies while working toward animating the blind spots in the collective reality of humankind. His non-objective paintings and animations generate worlds of plug-and-play constructivist expressionism where his work’s meaning comes from its actions on paper and canvas, as well as via in situ video projections.

A BFA from New York University and an MFA from California’s ArtCenter College of Design, Mr. Sheridan has held 13 solo exhibitions to date. His video has been screened in two Olympic Games and his work has been exhibited in museums like Centre Pompidou and Jeu de Paume in Paris, and CICA in South Korea.

Mr. Sheridan has participated in artist residencies such as Fountainhead in Miami, Instituto Sacatar in Brazil, and La Napoule Art Foundation in France. He has also won grants and residencies, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; an audiovisual grant from the secretary of culture of Bahia, Brazil; a Paradise AIR Residency sponsored by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunka-cho); and three UCLA faculty development grants.

In the summer of 2025, Mr. Sheridan collaborated with visual artist Vishwa Shroff, architect Katsushi Goto, and philosopher Rohit Goel on a series of short, animated, live-mixed architectural video projections in Mumbai and Vadodara, India. This was followed in autumn 2025 by a solo exhibition in CDMX, Mexico, called Destino Floreciente; there, he premiered a new bespoke work for Mexico City entitled Doom In Bloom. His work is part of collections in America, France, and Australia.

Mr. Sheridan has taught at NYU/Tisch in New York and Singapore, the School of Visual Arts in New York, and at UCLA’s Geffen Academy in Los Angeles.

Mr. Sheridan’s Fulbright-Nehru project, “Elephants in the Room”, is a multidisciplinary collaboration between two visual artists, an architect, and a philosopher who theorize, then visualize, about intersections between eastern, western, and global philosophies, to expand beyond the sensory limitations of contemporary “society of the spectacle”. It is employing the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) approach for the deliverables, including drawing, painting, installation-based animated architectural projections, live-mixed video, exploratory music and audio with experimental documentary, and narrative cinema. Essentially, this collaborative project is reconceiving architecture/built form as a fluid interface in an attempt to animate the blind spots in humankind’s shared reality.

Sashi Satpathy

Prof. Sashi Satpathy obtained his PhD in physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1982, his MSc from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1977, and his BSc from Utkal University, India. After several years of postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute, Stuttgart, and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, California, he joined the physics department at the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1987 as an assistant professor, where he is currently a curators’ distinguished professor of physics. Prof. Satpathy’s research area is theoretical condensed matter physics. He has over 150 publications in scientific journals and has mentored about 20 doctoral and postdoctoral scholars over his career. Well known for a number of seminal contributions to the electronic structure theory of solids as well as to the photonic band structure, Prof. Satpathy uses both numerical and analytical tools to study contemporary problems in condensed matter physics. Recent examples are strong spin-orbit coupled systems, orbital Hall and spin Hall effects, and the physics of the skyrmions. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Physics, London.

Carrying information using spin and orbital transport, as opposed to the standard charge transport, is an emerging area of research in condensed matter physics, which has the potential to revolutionize future electronics. Prof. Satpathy’s Fulbright-Nehru project is developing a fundamental understanding about orbital transport, specifically about the orbital Hall effect, which involves transport of orbital moments. Toward this, theoretical models are being developed and the results are being validated through calculations based on the density functional theory.