Archives: Meet Our USA Fulbrighters

Chaya Gopalan

Dr. Chaya Gopalan received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Bangalore University, India, and her PhD from the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She continued her research as a postdoctoral research fellow at Michigan State University. Her teaching career included a tenure-track faculty member at St. Louis Community College and St. Louis College of Pharmacy before assuming a full professor position at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE). She has been teaching anatomy, physiology, and pathophysiology at both graduate and undergraduate levels for health professional programs. Dr. Gopalan has been practicing evidence-based teaching using team-based learning, case-based learning, and, most recently, the flipped classroom methods. She has received many teaching awards, including the Arthur C. Guyton Educator of the Year award from the American Physiological Society (APS), Outstanding Two-Year College Teaching award by the National Association of Biology Teachers, and Excellence in Undergraduate Education award by SIUE. She has also received several grants, including an NSF-IUSE, an NSF-STEM Talent Expansion Program, and the APS Teaching Career Enhancement awards. Dr. Gopalan has published numerous manuscripts and case studies and contributed to several textbook chapters and question banks for textbooks and board exams. She is the author of the textbook Biology of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Diseases (Elsevier, 2022) and a frequent workshop facilitator and keynote speaker on teaching and learning in the US and abroad. Besides teaching and research, Dr. Gopalan is very active in the teaching section of the APS, where she currently serves as the Advisory Board Member of the Center for Physiology Education. Besides teaching and research, Dr. Gopalan enjoys mentoring her students and peers.

This Fulbright-Nehru proposal seeks to assess the current teaching practices in a rural college in India and subsequently provide faculty training to incorporate student-centered instructional methods such as flipped teaching in their courses and examine perceptions and intentions of faculty towards using innovative instructional strategies, faculty experiences in designing, implementing, and refining flipped teaching, and student outcomes of flipped classes. The proposed study intends to gain knowledge on student and faculty feedback on flipped instruction in a rural college in India with technological gaps. The potential and mitigating factors in implementing successful flipped teaching will aid in developing successful student-centered classrooms.

Umesh Garg

Dr. Umesh Garg, Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame, graduated from Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, and obtained a PhD in experimental nuclear physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. After postdoctoral work at the Cyclotron Institute, Texas A & M University, he joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1982.

Dr. Garg’s area of expertise is experimental nuclear physics. His current research interests include experimental investigation of compressional-mode giant resonances and exotic quantal rotation in nuclei. Some of his major accomplishments include the discovery of the isoscalar giant dipole resonance, an exotic mode of nuclear vibration, and elucidation of its properties; experimental determination of the nuclear incompressibility and the asymmetry term; first observation of longitudinal wobbling in nuclei; first observation of tidal waves in nuclei; first observation of a composite pair of chiral rotational bands, and affirmation of chirality in odd-A nuclei; and, first observation of multiple chiral bands (MχD) in nuclei. His research efforts have been truly international, involving collaborations over the years with scientists in Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, France, Finland, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for Advancement of Science. Dr. Garg was a Fulbright Specialist Awardee on Physics Education (2015-2020) and has been a JSPS (Japan) Fellow (2012) and PKU (China) Fellow (2012). He has been a consultant/visiting or adjunct professor at many universities and institutions: Argonne National Laboratory; BARC, Mumbai; GSI, Darmstadt; Peking University: Texas A & M University; TIFR, Mumbai; Xi’an Jiaotong University; and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.

Dr. Garg has served on a number of committees and boards, including the APS Committee on Governance, and the Program Committee of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics. He currently serves on the Board of Editors of the journal Progress of Theoretical and Experimental Physics.

The proposed Fulbright-Nehru project aims at enhancing collaborations with Indian scientists on investigations of chirality and wobbling in nuclei. These exotic modes of rotation are unique to triaxial nuclei—ellipsoids with all three axes unequal. Dr. Garg and his associates aims to perform measurements using the Indian National Gamma Array, a unique and truly world-class detector system, to study the band structures associated with chirality and wobbling. He also intends to give a series of lectures across India on these topics, along with some “general purpose” lectures meant to inspire students aspiring to pursue a career in physics.

William Elison

Prof. William Elison studied at Williams College and received a PhD in the history of religions from the University of Chicago. He teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in Hinduism and related traditions as observed in India in the present day, mostly in vernacular languages, mostly among non-elite people.

As an urban ethnographer, he is committed to an ongoing program of research in the streets and poor neighborhoods of Mumbai. The first book-length product of this research, The Neighborhood of Gods, came out in 2018 from the University of Chicago Press. It examines how slum residents and other marginalized groups use religious images to mark and settle urban space. One of its main arguments is that sacred space is created according to a visual and somatic praxis observed across religious traditions. At the same time, it recasts, in a modern context, a question central to the history of Hindu thought: If the divine is manifest in the phenomenal world, then where and in what form do we recognize God? And with what sort of insight or authority?

Related research interests have included Adivasi (“tribal” or ST) communities; Indian slum neighborhoods and their village roots; and the mediation of darshan, or visual worship, by the movies and other technologies. From his student days, Prof. Elison has looked to Hindi popular cinema— “Bollywood”— for a window into modern Indian culture. His book on the landmark 1977 film Amar Akbar Anthony, coauthored with Christian Novetzke and Andy Rotman, was released in 2015 by Harvard University Press.

He has recently become interested in exploring the literary possibilities of ethnographic writing. His Fulbright-Nehru project this year intends to advance the next step in his fieldwork inquiry into religious life in Mumbai slum colonies.

A multisite ethnography of religious life in Mumbai slum communities. By “slum” Prof. Elison means housing consisting of unauthorized structures. Over half Mumbai’s population lives in such neighborhoods. By “religion” he means cults of local, territorial gods and divinized figures. This is a stratum of practice long associated with “village Hinduism” that Prof. Elison will demonstrate is a) observed in urban India; and b) not confined to Hindus. He will study gods as brokers of blessings and resources that flow into communities: vitality, cash, respect. Over a total of six months, Prof. Elison seeks to pursue simultaneous inquiries in three or more neighborhoods. His method is qualitative participant observation.

Ramesh Dangol

Dr. Ramesh Dangol joined Youngstown State University (YSU) in 2012 after completing a PhD in strategic management from Purdue University in Indiana. Since joining YSU, he has published manuscripts in Strategic Management Journal, International Journal of Production Economics, International Business Review, and Journal of International Management. His research focuses on how individuals and organizations develop capabilities and their implications on individual/ organizational performance.

Having examined the links between capabilities and performance, Dr. Dangol’s new research focuses on identifying obstacles (frictions) that prevent individuals from developing capabilities, and delineating the mechanisms by which capability frictions negatively influence individuals’ wellbeing. His new research will help government worldwide enact policies and invest in resources to circumvent capability frictions.

Dr. Dangol’s Fulbright-Nehru project seeks to examine the impact of violence against women (VAW) on their employment capabilities and, subsequently, economic wellbeing. Authors argue that VAW reduces women’s ability to develop employment capabilities by limiting spatial mobility. Consequently, women’s ability to secure employment essential to realize economic wellbeing is curtailed. Authors also posit that human extensibility can alleviate the adverse effects of VAW on employment capabilities by supplanting spatial mobility. This research calls for investments in human extensibility infrastructures to help women in high violence areas develop employment capabilities and realize economic wellbeing.

Mark Balmforth

Dr. Mark Balmforth is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. His work analyses inherited inequality in histories of encounter between South Asians, Europeans, and Americans. His first book project, titled “Schooling the Master: Caste Supremacy and American Education in British Ceylon,” charts the entwining of caste, nation, and gender in American missionary schools in Ceylon and was awarded the History of Education Society’s 2021 Claude A. Eggertsen Prize. Dr. Balmforth’s second major research project, tentatively titled “Buried Legacies: Slavery and Caste in the Indian Ocean,” rethinks connections between enslavement, caste, and migration in the Indian Ocean by tracing the 300-year odyssey of an oppressed-caste Tamil community from the 17th to the 20th centuries. His work has been published in the History of Education Quarterly, Review of Development & Change, CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion, and the International Journal of Asian Christianity.

Legacies of slavery shape conversations around the world about contemporary social and economic injustice. Over the last decade, scholars of South Asia have started to consider slavery’s impact on contemporary lives in the subcontinent, countering the dominant public and scholarly reliance upon terms like “bonded labor” or “agrestic servitude.” Contributing to the ongoing global conversation about slavery’s legacy, Dr. Balmforth’s Fulbright-Nehru project asks: what can the history of Dalit dye root-digging communities in India reveal about the intertwined careers of slavery and caste in South Asia?

Boaz Atzili

Dr. Boaz Atzili is an Associate Professor at the School of International Service of American University in Washington DC. He holds a PhD in Political Science from MIT and a BA from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Before coming to AU Dr. Atzili held a post-doctoral fellowship in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard University. His research focuses on territorial conflicts and peace, the politics of borders and borderlands, the security aspects of state weakness, and deterrence and coercion. He published two books, Good Fences Bad Neighbors: Border Fixity and International Conflict (University of Chicago Press: 2012), and Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States that Host Nonstate Actors (Columbia University Press: 2018, with Wendy Perlman), as well as edited Territorial Designs and International Politics (Routledge: 2018, with Burak Kaderchan). His articles have been published, among other venues, in International Security, Security Studies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, International Studies Review, and Territory, Politics, Governance.

Among other awards, Dr. Atzili’s work has gained the 2006 Edger E. Furniss Award for the best first book in international security from the Mershon Center for International Security, and the Kenneth N. Waltz Prize for the best 2006 dissertation in the area of security studies, from the American Political Science Association.

Dr. Atzili’s current project focuses on borderlands and buffer zones. He is interested in the way in which the interaction between center and periphery in borderlands affect interstate relations at the border, and the way international relations affect center-periphery relations within the borderlands. The project includes quantitative and qualitative components and an inter-regional comparison of South Asia and the Middle East.

India inherited from its British colonialists the notion that modern nation-state’s sovereignty stretches uniformly up to a country’s borders. But it also inherited a reality in which the presence of the state in its remote mountainous borderlands was very scarce. Dr. Atzili’s Fulbright-Nehru project seeks an investigation of center-periphery relations in the Indian borderlands with China and Nepal in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and Ladakh. Through archival research and interviews, the research aims to advance our understanding of the role of center-periphery interaction in shaping perceptions, policies, and realities in the western Himalayas, at the edge of the Indian state.

Joshua Rosenthal

Dr. Joshua Rosenthal is a senior scientist at the Fogarty International Center of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is an ecologist with a long-standing interest in the integration of public health, environment, and international development. Dr. Rosenthal completed his PhD and postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley. He completed an AAAS Science and Diplomacy Fellowship at the NIH, was a Senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has been awarded three NIH Director’s Awards for work across the agency in support of public health and environment. Dr. Rosenthal has developed and led numerous programs at the NIH in environment and health research, as well as in capacity building in low- and middle-income countries, including the International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups; the International Training and Research in Environmental and Occupational Health; Ecology of Infectious Diseases; Global Environmental and Occupational Health Research Hubs; the Household Air Pollution Intervention Network; and the Clean Cooking Implementation Science Network. Presently, Dr. Rosenthal co-chairs the NIH Working Group on Climate Change and Health. His current work is substantially focused on climate change and health, and on interventions to reduce exposure to household air pollution. Dr. Rosenthal’s research- and policy-related publications can be found at: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=BztHZSIAAAAJ

While the health consequences of climate change are becoming apparent around the world, the relevant agencies are woefully underprepared to address them. From trauma, injury, and deaths resulting from extreme weather events, to increased rates of infectious diseases, chronic respiratory and mental health conditions, the world is facing profound threats to the gains in public health that have been made over the past decades. For his Fulbright-Kalam fellowship, Dr. Rosenthal is working with Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education and Research (SRIHER) in Chennai and other Indian institutions to develop a new master’s in public health (MPH) curriculum in the field of climate change and health.

Trevor Price

Dr. Trevor Price, PhD, FRS, is an expert on the effects of climate on the distribution of species. He has a bachelor’s degree in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge, UK, and a PhD in quantitative genetics from the University of Michigan. He is a tenured faculty member in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago

Dr. Price teaches courses in environmental ecology and biostatistics. His book, Ecology of a Changed World (Oxford University Press, 2022) summarizes the threats and challenges to the natural world in the 21st century. It forms the basis for the undergraduate courses he teaches to both biology majors and biology non-majors.

Dr. Price’s general research interests are in the distribution of biodiversity across the Himalaya and in the Indian subcontinent wherein he asks questions such as: why are there twice as many species in the east Himalaya (e.g. Sikkim) than in the west Himalaya (e.g. Himachal Pradesh)? Why are there more species in the mid-elevations in the Himalaya than at lower or higher elevations? What are the ongoing impacts of climate change and land-use change on the distribution of bird species? To tackle these questions, he studies birds and trees and uses various molecular techniques to assess the relationships among species and populations. He has published on these issues in journals such as Nature, Science, and Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society.

Dr. Price is a former Guggenheim and Mercator fellow at the University of Cologne (2004). In 2016, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2022, he became a fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Dr. Price’s Fulbright-Kalam project is building on the baseline data collected from Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Himachal Pradesh, on bird abundances. The goals are to: extend research on birds in the breeding season in Himachal Pradesh, especially integrating the work by students from the host institution; expand the research from birds to birch trees, because birch is so important to the local communities; monitor bird populations in the winter in the Indian peninsula; teach at the University of Ladakh; and visit several institutions to disseminate findings and to learn more about what others are discovering.

Siva Gogineni

Dr. Siva Prasad Gogineni received a BE in electronics and communications from Mysore University in 1973, an MSc in engineering from Kerala University in 1976, and a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Kansas (KU) in 1984. He began his teaching career as a visiting assistant professor in 1984 and retired as the Deane E. Ackers Distinguished Professor, in 2016 from KU. Currently, Dr. Gogineni is the Cudworth Professor in the College of Engineering and the director of the Remote Sensing Center at the University of Alabama (UA).

Dr. Gogineni was the founding director of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) at KU from 2005 to 2016. He is an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) fellow and also served as manager of NASA’s polar program from 1997–1999. He received the Louise Byrd Graduate Educator Award at KU and was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Tasmania in 2002.

Dr. Gogineni has been involved with radar sounding and imaging of ice sheets for about 35 years and contributed to the first successful demonstration of SAR imaging of the ice bed through more than 3-km-thick ice. He also led the development of ultra-wideband radars for measuring the thickness of snow over sea ice and the mapping of internal layers in polar firn and ice. Dr. Gogineni and his students also developed early versions of all radars flown as a part of NASA’s Operation IceBridge (OIB). Besides, the remote sensing team at UA demonstrated the first successful sounding of about 3-km-thick ice in Greenland and Antarctica at 750 MHz and 1.25 GHz, respectively. Dr. Gogineni is the lead author or co-author of 150 archival journal publications and has given or contributed to over 250 conference presentations.

Dr. Gogineni’s Fulbright-Kalam project is developing advanced radars for airborne monitoring of snow and ice in the Indian Himalayas in collaboration with institutions in India. The current systems do not provide adequate fine-resolution measurements of the vast freshwater resources on mountain glaciers and snow in high elevations because they are often difficult to measure using traditional in situ and labor-intensive methods. Advances in remote sensing and deployment platforms are required for regional airborne surveys of snow and ice. The project is also establishing long-term collaborations to develop airborne radars for fine-resolution regional-scale surveys of snow and ice.

Rajagopalan Balaji

Prof. Rajagopalan Balaji is a professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering (CEAE) and a fellow of the Cooperative Institute of Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado (CU) in Boulder. He was the former chair (2014–2022) of the department. He received his BTech in civil engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, India, in 1989, MTech in optimization and reliability engineering from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, in 1991, and a PhD in stochastic hydrology and hydroclimatology from Utah State University, Logan, in 1995. Following this, he worked as a research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, NY, before joining the faculty of CEAE at CU, Boulder, where he was promoted to full professorship in 2010.

Prof. Balaji pursues research in diverse interdisciplinary areas spanning hydroclimatology, water resources management, Indian summer monsoon, paleoclimate, and stochastic hydrology. For his research contributing to the improved operations, management, and planning of water resources in the semiarid river basins of western USA, especially the Colorado River System, Prof. Balaji was a co-recipient of the Partners in Conservation Award from the Department of Interior in 2009. Besides, his joint work on unraveling the mystery of the Indian summer monsoon droughts which appeared in Science in 2006 was awarded the prestigious Norbert Gerbier Mumm Award from the World Meteorological Organization in 2009. In 2019, he was elected fellow of the American Geophysical Union..

Prof. Balaji has a strong publication record in peer-reviewed journals like Science, Nature Geoscience, and Geophysical Research Letters. He has also served as an associated editor of ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management and Geophysical Research Letters, and currently serves as an associate editor of Water Resources Research and Climate Research.

The socioeconomic health of India’s people and ecosystems is intricately tied to the pulse of its monsoonal climate and variability, but this is now under existential threat from climate change. The pressing need to understand the fingerprints of climate in natural and human systems to enable sustainable policies is motivating Prof. Balaji’s Fulbright-Kalam project. In this context, he is pursuing three research threads to understand and model the signatures of climate change and variability related to: hydroclimate extremes; water quality and public health; and the rise and fall of past societies in India and implications for future human migration.