Archives: Meet Our USA Fulbrighters

Gokul Sampath

Gokul Sampath is a doctoral student in the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research broadly centers on understanding and overcoming barriers to safe and reliable water access to all in the developing world. Currently, Gokul’s work focuses on strategies to address exposure to dangerous drinking water contaminants in rural India, especially arsenic in groundwater.

Prior to joining MIT, Gokul worked as a senior research associate at Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), running randomized evaluations to measure the effectiveness of programs to reduce groundwater consumption in the drought-prone areas of western India. Gokul was a Fulbright-Nehru Student Researcher from 2014–2015 at A.N. College in Patna, Bihar. He completed his MA in Middle East, South Asian, and African studies at Columbia University, and his BS at the University of California, Davis.

Arsenic in groundwater is a major public health threat in eastern India. Lakhs of rural households are at elevated risk of cancer, stroke, and heart disease from exposure to arsenic in their primary drinking water source: the handpump tube wells on their home premises. Gokul’s Fulbright research is focusing on the social determinants of arsenic exposure in rural West Bengal. He is seeking to explain why households might choose an unsafe water source even when safe alternatives exist in their communities. By better understanding the constraints and norms that shape water-fetching decisions, he hopes to highlight ways to reduce arsenic exposure.

Lavanya Nott

Lavanya Nott is a PhD student in geography at UCLA. She has a master’s degree in South Asia studies from Cornell University and a bachelor’s in English literature and mathematics from Bryn Mawr College. She has worked in organizing and research in the area of labor rights in both India and the U.S., most recently, with an organization in Bengaluru on the working conditions in export-oriented manufacturing industries in South India. In the past, her research has been supported by Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, and UCLA-administered grants.

Outside of research, Lavanya is an avid baker and cook, and enjoys playing football with a local club and spending time with her dog, Abacus.

Lavanya’s Fulbright research is exploring past and current projects on food sovereignty in postcolonial India and their entanglements with anti-imperialist internationalist currents across the Third World. Her study is particularly on how struggles around food sovereignty have transformed in response to neoliberalism, and how they relate to broader questions of political and economic sovereignty in the postcolonial world.

Sarah Levenstam

Sarah Levenstam is pursuing a doctoral degree in the anthropology of religion at the University of Chicago, Divinity School, in Chicago, Illinois. She holds an MA in religious studies, also from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, and a dual BA in religious studies and anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. Sarah’s doctoral dissertation examines ideas and practices of dog management and care across India and Britain against the backdrop of imperial and national public works projects, international humanitarianism, and transnational animal welfare movements from 1857 through the present.

At the University of Chicago, Sarah’s research has been generously supported by the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS), the Nicholson Center for British Studies, and the Divinity School. She has received Critical Language Scholarships, Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, COSAS Fellowships, and an American Institute of Indian Studies Scholarship for language studies in Bangla, Urdu, and Sanskrit. She has previously worked in international education at World Learning, in historical and archival research for Hudson Institute, and in accessibility advocacy and community outreach with Rubin Museum of Art and the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions. She also fosters dogs for an animal shelter in Chicago.

Sarah’s Fulbright-Hayes research is tracing the transformation of the legal status of free-roaming dogs from straying “ferae naturae”, contained and culled in 19th-century colonial Calcutta, to legally-recognized “street dogs” who have accrued material and moral value in today’s Kolkata. She is looking at how dogs have inhabited this changing city and how the metrics of evaluating them as valuable or disposable have changed with time. She is also studying what the connected histories of dogs and humans together navigating this city’s public spaces reveal about cross-species hierarchies, practices of place-making, and claims of belonging in Kolkata.

Zachary Clark

Zachary Clark is a PhD candidate at Pennsylvania State University studying Late Qing and 20th-century Sino-Tibetan borderland history. Zachary received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Connecticut and then lived for over two years in Beijing, teaching English. He received his MA in Asia-Pacific studies from the University of San Francisco where he also worked at the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History. In the past two years, Zachary has been actively studying Chinese and Tibetan languages to gain a more nuanced and historical understanding of the ethnic and cultural diversity in China’s western regions.

Zachary’s research has its spotlight on the Sino-Tibetan borderland (today’s Tibet Autonomous Region, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan) from the Late Qing dynasty to the early 1950s. Within this region, he focuses on regional governance, sometimes designated as “warlordism”, which lasted for decades and navigated the governance of an ethnically diverse population of Tibetan, Han Chinese, Yi, and Hui Muslims amongst a radically shifting political landscape in both China and Tibet. His research bridges 20th-century Chinese and Tibetan history by foregrounding the interests, cultures, and ethnic groups prevalent in this borderland to better understand the early developments of nationalism, ethnicity, and identity outside of the central Chinese state.

In his free time, Zachary is a Premier League soccer enthusiast. He also enjoys hiking, watching Chinese and Tibetan films, and trying new Tibetan food recipes.

Zachary’s Fulbright-Hays project looks at the Sino-Tibetan region from 1905 to 1955, by focusing on three western provincial and regional capitals: Xining, Kangding, and Kunming. For this, he is using Chinese, English, and Tibetan sources to provide a more holistic, non-state view of the methods that regional government policies enacted on the periphery and the various Tibetan ethnic, political, and religious factors which shaped them. Zachary’s project argues that China’s far west, far from being politically irrelevant to the Chinese state, put forward new visons of modern state-making which shed light on the historical process of China’s transition from empire to nation state.

Erin Burke

Erin Burke is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.

Erin holds a BS/BA in anthropology and religious studies from the College of Charleston as well as an MA in religious studies from the University of Virginia. Her interests include the intersection of universal and indigenous religious traditions, definitions of secular and religious, and the role of imagination in religious practice and literature. She has been studying Tibetan language in Tibet, Nepal, and the United States for over 15 years. She has also conducted research in Tibet and Nepal on Tibetan literature and practice and is in the process of producing translations of religious and creative Tibetan stories.

In her Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, Erin is exploring the perspectives on the production and interpretation of Tibetan fiction by discussing late 20th-century and contemporary Tibetan short stories with Tibetan writers, publishers, and librarians. Her project is delving into how Tibetan short stories contribute to the modern Tibetan religious imagination. By identifying continuities with literary Buddhist and oral vernacular expressions, this project is shedding light on popular modes of religious thought that have been marginalized in the scholarship on Tibetan Buddhism. Erin is also studying how Tibetan literary narratives written by lay people foreground multivocal religious world views that do not often appear in normative Buddhist texts. In her discussions with Tibetan authors and intellectuals in Dharamshala, India, she is also investigating the ways in which the first popularly accessible literature in Tibetan history contributes to the ongoing development of Tibetan Buddhism.

Karl Krup

Dr. Karl Krupp, MSc, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health Practice, Policy, and Translational Research in the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona, Phoenix. He has been involved in implementation of public health interventions and research among at-risk disadvantaged communities in the U.S. and India since 2002. His earliest work focused on childhood asthma among African Americans living in public housing in Bayview– Hunters Point, San Francisco, and farmworkers in Central Valley, California. For the last 18 years, he has been working in India on the social determinants of health among rural and slum-dwelling populations. His research on HIV prevention, maternal health, primary and secondary prevention of cervical cancer, mental health, vaccine hesitancy, cardiovascular disease, and aging has been documented in more than 84 peer-reviewed publications like MMWR, AIDS, BMJ, Vaccine, International Journal of Cardiology, and Journal of Medical Microbiology.

Dr. Krupp holds a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Minnesota, a master’s degree in public health from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine at London University, and a PhD in public health from Florida International University in Miami. His dissertation research was titled “Prevalence and Correlates of Coronary Heart Disease in Slum-Dwelling South Indian Women”. The research was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the Fogarty International Center through a Global Health Equity Scholar Fellowship. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2020, Dr. Krupp has been working on the psychological antecedents of COVID-19 vaccine intentions among adults in Arizona, the validation of microRNA panels for detection of breast cancer and cervical cancer in blood, and on the interventions to reduce symptoms of dementia in mildly cognitively impaired older adults.

By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will reside in cities where more than one in 10 residents are elderly. The WHO has called for age-friendly cities where older people can “age actively” with security, good health, and full social participation. Dr. Krupp’s Fulbright study is using mixed methods for a policy analysis to examine aging programs, built environment, and policies in Mysuru, India, and Stockholm, Sweden. The research is gathering data from key stakeholders, including city planners, service providers, and civil society leaders.

Elysia Garcia

Ms. Elysia Garcia works for the North Shore School District 112 in Highland Park and Highwood, Illinois. She teaches a pre-kindergarten class of students in the three-to-five age group who are a mix of native English speakers, native Spanish speakers, and emerging bilinguals. The class is taught in an inclusive environment in both languages, addressing the needs of students with individual education plans. Ms. Garcia has worked in public and private educational settings for over 15 years. She has a BA from Concordia University and an MEd and an EdS from National Louis University. She is certified to impart early childhood and elementary education, as well as gifted education, along with teaching English as a second language, bilingual Spanish, and Spanish world language. In the school community, she enjoys working with older elementary students as a robotics coach. In her free time, she can be found running and always looking to explore new adventures such as an obstacle course race this past year. She lives in Illinois with her husband, two boys, and two cats.

For her Fulbright program, Ms. Garcia who is specializing in Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE), is working with the staff at the Avinashilingam Institute to help develop a unified curriculum based on developmentally appropriate practice (DP) for children in the age bracket of three to six. This unified DAP-based curriculum will serve ECCE professionals across India and specifically the teacher trainees enrolled at the institute. The Avinashilingam Institute will share the DAP-based curriculum with the Government of India for consideration as a major policy proposal to realize the proposed NEP (National Education Policy) goals. In this regard, Ms. Garcia is conducting meetings at the institute, working with colleagues to draft curricula frameworks, participating in panel discussions, and carrying out training workshops. She is also promoting developmentally appropriate teaching practices, and learning about Indian teaching methods and culture.

Sarah Reyes

Ms. Sarah Reyes has been teaching for 18 years and currently teaches at Abraham Depp Elementary in Dublin City School District, Ohio. She obtained her bachelor’s in music education and master’s in music education with Kodály certification from Capital University, Ohio, and spent a year studying music pedagogy at the Kodály Institute of Music in Kesckemét, Hungary. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study the music of Johann Sebastian Bach at a summer institute in Germany. All through her career, Ms. Reyes has been teaching general music and choir for students in the age group of five to 18. She has also hosted numerous musical activities for students outside of school, including choirs, music clubs, and a Hindustani and Carnatic ensemble. She has served on committees on curriculum and equity, as well as on diversity and inclusion in her school district. Her teaching experience includes rural, urban, and suburban school settings.

Ms. Reyes has also served as a presenter for the Tri-City Kodály Educators, Organization of American Kodály Educators, the International Kodály Society, and for graduate students at Capital University on the topic of inclusion of diverse music and cultures in music classrooms and choral settings. She is continuously seeking to expand her knowledge and has studied Brazilian music with bricante Estêvão Marques, Cuban rumba with Josh Ryan, West African music with Sowah Mensah, and mridangam and Carnatic music with Mysore Vadiraj. She loves being inspired by her students to learn new things, travel to destinations unknown, and nurture her innate curiosity for learning by seeing the world through many different lenses.

As part of her Fulbright project studying Carnatic music in India, Ms. Reyes is collecting musical materials and pedagogical practices to share with her learning community and the music education community. She believes that her immersive experience in India will enable her to engage with her students in Dublin and the greater music education community across the U.S. and elsewhere – all along reflecting the contexts of her learning community, honoring multiple learning modalities, and embracing music as a universal human experience.

Maria Loyd

Ms. Maria Loyd teaches English at Vel Phillips Memorial High School in Madison, Wisconsin, where she has taught mostly juniors and seniors for six years. There, she has served as a teacher leader, leading teachers in both her department and school in anti-racist educational practices and policies. She has also worked on curriculum development and has piloted a course focused on experiential learning. Her work in educational equity and innovative teaching and learning has helped Ms. Loyd to see that the connection between these two fields is natural and necessary: innovative instructional approaches, such as experiential learning, are key to addressing disparities in education. This ignited Ms. Loyd’s keen interest in studying new approaches to teaching and learning that can have a positive impact on the most marginalized communities around the globe. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in social, historical, and philosophical foundations of education from Florida State University.

Ms. Loyd’s Fulbright inquiry project is exploring innovative teaching methods in India, focusing specifically on how these new approaches are undertaken and what effect they are having on changing educational outcomes. Her research is attempting to support the creation of a framework to aid teachers in implementing innovative educational approaches. This framework will include standards, model curricula, and an evaluation component – all vital entities that can have a direct impact on learning.

Frances Walker

Frances Walker has a bachelor’s in anthropology (medical) from Princeton University, New Jersey, with minors in global health and health policy; gender, sex, and sexuality; and African American studies. After graduating in 2022 as a Princeton University Henry R. Labouisse ’26 Fellow, Frances worked on the ground with Humans for Humanity, an Indian NGO, on its menstrual health and wellness campaigns and projects. Her current research work is a continuation of her previous senior thesis research titled “Deconstructing Menstruation in India: From Stigma to Visibility in Non-Governmental Organizations”, on historical stigma and taboo regarding menstruation and their contemporary consequences for menstruators in India.

Prior to working and researching in India, Frances served as the assistant manager of Semicolon Bookstore in Chicago where she organized literature-based community service events benefiting hundreds of Chicago kids; she also curated speaking engagements for authors. As a student, Frances was the president of the Princeton Women’s Rugby Football Club and served on its alumni board, as well as worked as a Princeton Writing Center Fellow to help undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty with a variety of academic-writing projects. She also served as a multi-year volunteer at Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center in the emergency medicine and orthopedics departments. Frances is still an avid fan of rugby and plays it in her free time. Outside of this, she loves trekking, traveling, and trying new foods.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Frances is seeking to further understand the current shift in India towards more sustainable and eco-friendly menstruation products. For this, she is locating the key actors in the realm of sustainable menstruation in order to determine why and how these products are marketed, as well as to understand what drives these entities to create change. She is also looking into the barriers that restrict the menstruators’ ability to switch to these products, and also examining the consequences of burgeoning menstrual waste as the majority of India’s population moved to using sanitary napkins in the last 10 years.