USA Fellows Year: U.S. Fellows 2026-2027

Sreejayan Nair

Dr. Sreejayan Nair, PhD, MPharm, FAHA, is professor of pharmacology, chair of the Division of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and director of the Biomedical Sciences PhD Program at the University of Wyoming, and also serves as the pharmacology thread lead for the WWAMI Medical School, overseeing integrated pharmacology education for medical students. He received his PhD from the College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Manipal, India, and completed his postdoctoral training at the Department of Medicine II, Klinikum Grosshadern, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Germany, and the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, U.S. Dr. Nair has over 30 years of experience in pharmacology education, translational research, and mentorship, with his research focusing on protease biology and translational therapeutics for diabetes complications, cardiovascular disease, and neuroinflammation. He has led projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the American Heart Association (AHA), and the American Diabetes Association (ADA), and has received multiple industry grants, supporting both basic discovery and translational applications. He has also authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications. A co-founder of two pharmaceutical start-ups, Dr. Nair holds patents in protease-targeted therapeutics, and has served as the principal investigator on NIH SBIR/STTR grants for bridging academic research and commercial innovation. He also serves as the mentoring director for the WY-NIH Sensory Biology COBRE, providing structured guidance to junior faculty. His teaching has been consistently recognized with honors such as the Ellbogen Meritorious Classroom Teaching Award and the Entrepreneur Award at the National IDeA Symposium of Biomedical Research Excellence. He has also contributed to the training of PhD, postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students.

Dr. Nair’s Fulbright-Nehru project is integrating teaching and research to enhance pharmacology education and translational drug discovery at BITS Hyderabad. As part of the project, he is teaching a molecular pharmacology course, mentoring graduate students, and collaborating on molecular pharmacology/drug discovery projects related to diabetes complications and neuroinflammation. By combining classroom instruction with hands-on research and mentoring, the project aims to strengthen student training, support BITS’s PhD-IMPACT/DRIVE initiatives, and foster long-term Indo-U.S. collaborations in pharmacology and therapeutic innovation.

Suraj Muley

Dr. Suraj Muley is a neurologist and internationally recognized expert in neuromuscular medicine, neuroimmunology, myasthenia gravis, and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP). He serves as director of neurology at Bob Bové Neuroscience Institute at HonorHealth and is professor of medicine at Arizona State University School of Medicine and Advanced Medical Engineering. Dr. Muley completed his medical education at Seth Gordhandas Sunderdas Medical College, Mumbai, which was followed by research training in pharmacology and residency and fellowship training in neurology, clinical neurophysiology, and neuromuscular diseases at the University of Minnesota. He is board certified in neurology, clinical neurophysiology, and neuromuscular medicine.

Over a distinguished academic career spanning more than three decades, Dr. Muley has held major leadership roles at the University of Minnesota, Barrow Neurological Institute, and HonorHealth, including directing neuromuscular, neuroimmunology, fellowship, and residency programs. His clinical and research interests focus on immune-mediated neuromuscular disorders, with emphasis on novel targeted therapies for myasthenia gravis and CIDP. He has served as principal investigator or co-investigator on numerous national and international clinical trials in neuromuscular diseases.

Dr. Muley has authored and co-authored numerous peer-reviewed publications, book chapters, invited reviews, and international presentations in neuromuscular medicine. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology (FAAN), Fellow of the American College of Physicians (FACP), and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (FRCP Edin). His honors include multiple teaching and research awards.

Dr. Muley’s Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on advancing neuromuscular medicine and neuroimmunology in India through collaborative teaching, research, and clinical training. Working with leading academic medical centers in Mumbai, his project emphasizes inflammatory neuropathies and myasthenia gravis, with particular focus on advanced electrophysiological techniques and emerging targeted therapies. The project aims to strengthen subspecialty education, promote collaborative clinical research, and develop sustainable academic partnerships between Indian and U.S. institutions. By leveraging India’s large and diverse patient population, the project seeks to improve understanding and treatment of immune-mediated neurological disorders while fostering long-term global collaboration in neuroscience.

Chiara Logli

Prof. Chiara Logli is an assistant professor and institutional assessment specialist at Honolulu Community College, Hawai‘i. Her research centers on international and comparative education. She holds an MA in political science from the University of Bologna (Italy) and a PhD in educational foundations/international cultural studies from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She has worked at the International House at University of California (UC) Berkeley and at the UC Santa Barbara Multicultural Center, and has taught college-level courses in the U.S. and Indonesia. Her project experience includes USAID, UNICEF, UNDP, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, CAST/International Baccalaureate Schools, and the Italian consulate. She is a recipient of fellowships from the East-West Center, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Program, the United States–Indonesia Society, the Rotary International Peace Program, and the European Union’s Erasmus/Leonardo Program.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Logli is teaching courses on qualitative research design and also conducting a study on how Indian universities contribute to higher education by balancing local and global allegiances. Her research is centered on place-based approaches that shape institutional identity while offering insights for broader international contexts. Dr. Logli is particularly interested in India as it sustains a complex higher education system marked by both ancient legacies and forward-looking innovations. Through teaching, research, and collaboration with faculty and students, the project is contributing to ongoing conversations on higher education across borders. The project will culminate in a comparative study of higher education systems in the world’s largest democracies: India, the United States, and Indonesia.

Aesha John

Dr. Aesha John is a professor of social work at Texas Christian University (TCU), where she teaches courses on care across the lifespan and an elective on grief and loss. Her scholarship focuses on disability, inclusion, parenting, and children’s media use, with a particular emphasis on understanding the lived experiences of families of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD).

Dr. John’s research spans multiple cultural contexts, including the United States and India. Her work aims to advance culturally responsive frameworks that center family strengths, improve service delivery, and promote inclusive practices. Her recent work examines children’s media use and parent–child relationships, highlighting how digital engagement intersects with family dynamics and children’s social–emotional development.

Her research has been widely published in leading journals on IDD, including the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders and the Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities. She has received the Disability Manuscript Award from the Council on Social Work Education and the Deans’ Award for Research and Creativity from TCU. She has also received grant funding twice from the Jerry M.D. Lewis Foundation, most recently to support her study on children’s media use and parent–child relationships.

Beyond research and teaching, Dr. John is committed to community engagement and experiential learning. She has led a book club for individuals with IDD and facilitated a job training program for individuals with IDD on the TCU campus. She regularly creates opportunities for her students to engage with vulnerable populations in the community, thereby fostering meaningful, relationship-centered learning experiences that bridge classroom knowledge with real-world practice.

Dr. John’s Fulbright-Nehru project is combining teaching and research to advance cross-cultural understanding of parenting and IDD. She is delivering modules on IDD and lifespan development to psychology and social work students at Christ University, Bengaluru. Her research is also examining parental reactions to their children’s autism diagnosis. Further, she is exploring how families understand, process, and adapt to a diagnosis across cultural contexts, with the aim of informing culturally sensitive, family-centered support and interventions.

Joris Gielen

Dr. Joris Gielen is the Eugene P. Beard Endowed Chair in Professional Ethics and the director of the Center for Global Health Ethics at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, where he also serves as associate professor. His work focuses on the ethical, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of serious illness and end-of-life care, and his scholarly interests include global bioethics, end-of-life decision-making, and spirituality and cultural competence in healthcare. His academic training covers history, religious studies, theology, and Indian philosophy. He has an MA in Indian philosophy and religion from Banaras Hindu University and a PhD in theology from the University of Leuven, Belgium.

In his international and interdisciplinary career, Dr. Gielen has conducted extensive fieldwork in healthcare in India. His scholarship includes numerous peer-reviewed publications on palliative care, spirituality, ethics, and cultural competence in Indian healthcare, with his articles appearing in the Indian Journal of Palliative Care, Journal of Religion and Health, Palliative & Supportive Care, and Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy. He is also the editor of Dealing with Bioethical Issues in a Globalized World: Normativity in Bioethics (Springer, 2020). He has taught widely in the United States, Belgium, and India, offering graduate and undergraduate courses on different aspects of healthcare ethics, empirical methods, and culturally competent care.

Dr. Gielen’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining how patients, families, and clinicians in India navigate end-of-life decision-making. It is exploring the ethical tensions between autonomy, traditional values, and legal regulations within India’s healthcare system. By using participant observation and semi-structured interviews in New Delhi, the study is developing a grounded theory to explain the dynamics when decisions regarding the end of life are made. The project aims to foster understanding of end-of-life decision-making and contribute to the bioethics discourse through culturally responsive research and teaching.

David Gere

Dr. David Gere, PhD, is the director of the Art & Global Health Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He founded the center in 2006. He is also a professor in UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, where he teaches courses on art and global health. His book How to Make Dances in an Epidemic (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) received the award for outstanding book publication from the Congress on Research in Dance. It was also nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and received a special citation from the Society of Dance History Scholars. His co-edited volumes include Looking Out: Perspectives on Dance and Criticism in a Multicultural World (1995); Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader (2003); and Through Positive Eyes (2019). In the visual art world, Dr. Gere has co-curated four major exhibitions and took them to multiple locations in South Africa – the Durban Art Gallery, Museum Africa in Johannesburg, and the Slave Lodge in Cape Town – as well as the Fowler Museum at UCLA. He studied music, dance, and the Tamil language in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, on an Oberlin Shansi Fellowship from 1980 to 1982 and, in 2004, was based in Bengaluru as a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar.

Nearly 50 years ago, Dr. Gere taught ethical studies and organized arts programs at the American College in Madurai. Now, as the founding director of UCLA’s Art & Global Health Center, he is revisiting, as part of his Fulbright-Nehru project, the arts of South India with a special emphasis on the programs and projects intended to improve health and save lives. Alongside his research, he is sharing ideas generated from his experience in art and global health with the students and faculty in India.

Vanessa Botelho

Prof. Vanessa Botelho is an associate professor of broadcast and digital journalism at the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. She is also the director of the TV news and digital specialization within the master’s in journalism program. Prof. Botelho is a two-time Emmy Award-winning live television news producer. For nearly three decades, she produced hundreds of hours of live breaking news programs for millions of viewers in the largest media market in the United States, New York City. She is also a former executive producer, who helped launch a television news station in Boston, Massachusetts, for NBC. She is a visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Oxford University’s Wolfson College. Prof. Botelho is also a writing instructor for the Oxford Writing Mentors. She has received the prestigious Tow fellowship to support her historical memoir that blends her Anglo-Indian identity with her experience in the fast-paced world of live television news, as well as her family’s immigration experience leaving Calcutta, India, for Brooklyn, New York, in the late 1970s.

She received her master’s degree in biography and memoir from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and her bachelor’s degree in communication arts and journalism from New York Institute of Technology.

For her Fulbright-Nehru teaching and research project, Prof. Botelho is collaborating with Dr. Avishek Parui and Dr. Merin Simi Raj at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Chennai. She is conducting research for her historical memoir at IIT Madras’ Centre for Memory Studies. Her research is also based in Kolkata, where she was born. Focusing on the Anglo-Indian communities of Chennai and Calcutta, she is exploring the facets of identity and memory in postcolonial India. As part of her project, she is also teaching video journalism to graduate students at IIT Madras, demonstrating to them the importance of ethical journalism and how it is key to telling the stories of the underserved.

Purushottama Bilimoria

Prof. Purushottama Bilimoria teaches philosophy at the University of San Francisco. He is also a principal fellow at the University of Melbourne and the principal editor-in-chief of the Sophia journal and the monograph series, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures. Formerly, he was a distinguished professor of law and global ethics at O.P. Jindal Global University, India. He specializes in Indian and cross-cultural philosophy, global critical philosophies of religion, Indian constitutional and personal law, cross-cultural civil rights discourse, and diaspora studies. An elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, Prof. Bilimoria is the recipient of several awards and research grants, including from the United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF), John Templeton Foundation, the Indian Council for Philosophical Research, Harvard Divinity School, and Emory University’s Institute for the Liberal Arts. His recent publications include: History of Indian Philosophy (Routledge, 2019); Contemplative Studies and Hinduism (with Rita D. Sherma, Routledge, 2021); The Routledge Companion to Indian Ethics: Women, Justice, Bioethics and Ecology (with Amy Rayner, 2024); Mind, Body and Self (with Jaysankar Lal Shaw, Anand Vaidya, and Michael Hemmingsen, Springer, 2024); and Engaging Philosophies of Religion: Thinking Across Boundaries (with Gereon Kopf and Nathan Loewen, Bloomsbury, 2025). Currently, he is writing an entry article on Hindu ethics for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and also working on early Indian liberalism.

Prof. Bilimoria’s Fulbright-Nehru project is building on his extensive work on the articulation of liberalism by three great stalwarts of Indian liberalism in early twentieth-century India – Gopal Krishna Gokhale and his disciples, V.S. Srinivasa Sastri and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It is investigating the political and philosophical horizon of the nationalist trajectory, through to India’s Independence and its aftermath in the late twentieth century. The project is also focusing on a decisive reconstruction of the labors of Indian liberals toward constitutionalism, freedom, social reforms, duties, rights, and reformulation of a distinct vision of liberalism, in contrast to Western liberal theories, particularly those bequeathed by colonial masters, philosophers, and the Indian elite.

Mahadev Bhat

Dr. Mahadev Bhat is a distinguished university professor of natural resource economics in the Department of Earth and Environment and the Department of Economics at Florida International University (FIU), Miami, FL. He earned his PhD in agricultural economics from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and his MS in agricultural economics from the College of Agriculture, Dharwad, India.

His research focuses on economics and policy issues relating to natural resources, including ecosystem services, water resources, coastal and marine systems, and agriculture. He has produced over 380 scholarly contributions, including refereed journal articles, book chapters, technical reports, presentations, and invited lectures. Dr. Bhat has secured more than USD 25 million in competitive research funding from agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Bhat co-founded the agroecology program at FIU and led the development of a training and farm-start-up initiative for underserved farmers and veterans, all supported by more than 40 USDA grants. Three of these grants helped establish a multi-university consortium focused on training Hispanic students in South Florida and Puerto Rico. His honors include the U.S. Society for Ecological Economics’ Bernardo Aguilar Award (2019), the FIU Faculty Excellence Award for Research (2020), the FIU Presidential Excellence Award (2016), and the Soil and Water Conservation Society’s Berg Fellowship (1992).

Dr. Bhat has actively promoted Indian language and culture in the United States through over 30 years of volunteer service, value-based teaching, and artistic production/direction at local and national cultural organizations.

Dr. Bhat’s Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on community-based and culturally rooted forest conservation strategies in India. The project is evaluating the ecosystem services provided by sacred forests and is developing policy pathways that integrate traditional knowledge system into sustainable forest management. He is conducting his research at the University of Agricultural Sciences’ College of Forestry at Sirsi and is also collaborating with the Indian Institute of Technology Dharwad and the Nature Environment and Wildlife Society, Kolkata. Further, he is comparing restoration experiences between the Florida Everglades and India’s Sundarbans to advance cross-regional insights into ecosystem management.

Madasamy Arockiasamy

Dr. Madasamy Arockiasamy is a professor of civil, environmental, and geomatics engineering at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) and its director of the Center for Infrastructure and Constructed Facilities. He earned his PhD in structural mechanics/engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and both his MSc in structural engineering and BE (Hons.) in civil engineering from the University of Madras. He is a registered professional engineer in several U.S. states and Canada, and is an elected fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

With more than four decades of academic, research, and professional experience, Dr. Arockiasamy has served in leadership and faculty positions at FAU, the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Anna University, and the College of Engineering, Guindy, India. He has also been a research engineer and structural engineering specialist. He has contributed extensively to institutional, national, and international professional activities, including serving as a subject matter expert for the International Electrotechnical Commission.

Dr. Arockiasamy’s research and publications focus on subjects such as structural mechanics, offshore and coastal infrastructure, bridge infrastructure systems, non-contact structural monitoring, and AI applications in civil engineering. He has authored and edited several books and proceedings, and has published extensively in leading engineering journals, including ASCE, Elsevier, and MDPI journals. His recent work includes studies on offshore wind monopile foundations, bridge deterioration modeling, and laser-based infrastructure monitoring.

He has received numerous recognitions, including the John J. Guarrera Engineering Educator of the Year Award and the Distinguished Engineering Educator Award.

Dr. Arockiasamy’s Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on a combination of teaching and research activities. The teaching activities involve co-teaching, leading, and co-organizing workshops and seminars, curriculum enhancement, graduate student mentoring, and bilateral knowledge exchange at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. The project’s research activities are focusing on the development of a geo-AI dashboard by integrating satellite data, GIS, and AI/ML techniques to address key challenges in hazard prediction (landslides, coastal erosion, and water stress), disaster risk reduction, coastal monitoring, sustainable agriculture, water resource optimization, and blue economy applications.