Archives: Meet Our USA Fulbrighters

Purnima Madhivanan

Dr. Purnima Madhivanan is an Associate Professor in Health Promotion Sciences at the Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at University of Arizona, Tucson. She received her medical training at the Government Medical College in Mysore, India and then an MPH and PhD in Epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Madhivanan has extensive experience in conducting multi-site domestic and international clinical and translational studies. She is the site PI and the Director of the Global Health Training Program at University of Arizona, Tucson for the Global Health Equity Scholar consortium in collaboration with Stanford, Yale and University of California, Berkeley. She also directs the Fogarty-Fulbright Fellowship program for University of Arizona. Dr. Madhivanan has been a PI of multiple federal and foundation grants, as well as a mentor and investigator of numerous NIH, CDC, and industry-sponsored studies and clinical trials. She has also served on multiple national and international research and steering committees.

Her research has focused on disadvantaged populations, elucidating the dynamics of poverty, gender, and the sociopolitical determinants of health, in particular the impact on women and children living in rural and limited resource communities. She has worked in India, Peru, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Nigeria, Ethiopia and in the US. To situate her research close to the communities she serves, she established a clinical site in Mysore, India in 2005 while completing her PhD dissertation. For over a decade, the Prerana Women’s Health Initiative has delivered low-cost, high-quality comprehensive reproductive health services to 50,000 low-income women living in Mysore.

Her work has resulted in more than 200 peer-review publications. She continues to develop novel lines of research and has been supported by foundations, biotechnology companies, federal and international funding organizations. Dr. Madhivanan serves as an advisor to a number of state departments of Public Health, non-profit as well as governmental research organizations. In 2007, she received the prestigious International Leadership Award from the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation for her work on HIV prevention. She is recipient of several teaching and mentoring awards including the Maria Valdez Mentoring Award at the University of Arizona

The overarching goal of Dr. Madhivanan’s Fulbright-Nehru project is to advocate for the medical and social needs of female cancer survivors and build capacity for research that will develop a survivorship care evidence base, explore strategies to facilitate provision of survivorship care, and disseminate best survivorship care practices to Indian physicians and public health practitioners. It is estimated that about 34,000 women are diagnosed annually with cancer in the south Indian state of Karnataka. Assuming an 81% overall five-year survival rate, the state would have more than 137,000 women cancer survivors in any year. In India, there is almost no active follow-up for patients who survive cancer treatment and there is limited information about their physical and mental health, and overall quality of life.

Margaret Phillips

Prof. Margaret Phillips is a paralegal educator, lawyer, writer and access to justice activist focused on developing experiential learning for paralegal students while promoting access to justice for under-served communities. She is currently the Director of the Paralegal Studies program at Daemen University in Buffalo, New York, and prior to that she taught Legal Research and Writing at the University of Buffalo School of law and was a civil litigator with experience in negligence, civil rights, and discrimination.

As an educator, Prof. Phillips is experienced in developing curriculum, presenting and teaching on topics ranging from social justice, legal ethics, legal research and writing, introduction to law, and legal research methods. She has presented to audiences including high school groups, paralegals, paralegal educators, practicing attorneys, and college students. She was recently selected to do a Tedx Buffalo talk “What if the Constitution Could Talk?”

As a writer, Prof. Phillis is the author of a college textbook on legal analysis and writing entitled: “A Practical Guide to Legal Research and Analysis for Paralegal and Legal Studies Students.” She also writes a regular column for the Bar Association for Erie County entitled “Spotlight on Paralegals.”

Her current scholarly focus is on access to justice effort locally, nationally, and internationally. As the program director for Paralegal Studies, she has been active in creating the Paralegal Clinic course as well as community-based short-term clinics such as expungement clinics to eradicate low-level marijuana related criminal convictions.

During her Fulbright-Nehru grant, Prof. Phillips intends to collaborate, develop and co-teach legal skills curriculum for paralegals and interns at the Human Rights Law Network, the legal clinics at the National Law University Delhi, and other paralegal organizations. The primary goal is to increase these organizations’ capacity, communication and collaboration to promote access to justice. The secondary goal is to form solid collaborations between the not-for-profits and law schools to enhance access to representation. Specifically, the training and teaching will support Human Rights Law Network in hosting more volunteers, enhance and grow legal clinics at NLU Delhi, and support community paralegal networks.

Anita Charles

Dr. Anita Charles is Director of Teacher Education and Senior Lecturer at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine. In the past, she has taught a wide variety of ages and abilities, from first graders through adult learners, including more than ten years as a high school English teacher.

Dr. Charles has conducted many workshops on a wide range of topics, including autism, special education, digital literacies, and teaching methodologies.

As a Fulbright Scholar in India in 2016, Dr. Charles taught undergraduates and explored issues of literacy and inclusion in pre-K-12 schools. Subsequently, she engaged in research on inclusive education for children with disabilities in India.

Dr. Charles has a PhD from University of New Hampshire in the area of Adolescent Literacy. Her dissertation on digital, social, and academic literacies won two national awards. She holds an MEd from Harvard and a BA from Dartmouth College. She has published numerous articles as well as several book chapters. In 2019, she also appeared on a nationally televised ABC news special with Diane Sawyer entitled “Screentime.”

For her Fulbright-Nehru grant, Dr. Charles plans to present on topics related to teacher education, literacy, inclusion and diversity, and/or similar areas of expertise. Her philosophy is based in progressive theory, which promotes a student’s learning process as one of teacher-student interaction, discovery, and growth, through a recognition of social and cultural contexts. In India, a number of initiatives strive to improve educational opportunities, processes, and outcomes for all children. In addition to teaching, she hopes to assist a host institution in curriculum/program development, participate in meetings as an active member of the organization, engage in local community outreach, and give presentations or workshops.

Jamie Barber

Prof. Jamie Barber holds a position in the academic and professional writing program at the University at Buffalo where she also served as the interim director of the Journalism Certificate Program in 2021-2022. Prof. Barber’s work in the classroom aims to decenter concepts of “normal” in order to invite students to leverage their diverse backgrounds and abilities as they develop their writing skills. She recently taught a class titled “Writing for Change” in which students learned research and writing skills while trying to enact change on a real-world problem that intersected with their interests and identities. These writing students extended the impact of their writing and learning by creating multimodal “campaigns” to get the word out about their change-making ideas. Students created activist-centered zines, podcasts, infographics, and other documents that extended beyond text-based communication. Prof. Barber is currently co-designing a first-year writing course in which students will explore their language backgrounds while speculating on what linguistic justice might look like in academic and professional writing contexts.

Prof. Barber’s creative work often focuses on interactions between humans and the more-than-human world. Her essay “The Trouble with Cockroaches” explores tension between a “do-no-harm” attitude and a cockroach infestation. Her essay “Accepting Impermanence” speculates that ancient people may have advice for a new mother. Prof. Barber is also developing her journalism portfolio, recently writing about earthquake research for Temblor, and about the Buffalo, NY community for Buffalo Rising.

Prof. Barber’s Fulbright-Nehru project seeks to build a collaborative framework between students, educators, artists, designers, and scientists. She plans to work with the Science Gallery Bengaluru, an institution already engaged in powerful connections between the arts and the sciences, to build workshops that will connect students to this collaborative framework. Students will learn science while they engage in multimodal science communication projects.

Sofya Yuditskaya

Ms. Sofya Yuditskaya is a site-specific media artist, curator, and educator working with sound, video, interactivity, projections, code, paper, and salvaged material. Her work focuses on techno-occult rituals, street performance, and participatory art. Ms. Yuditskaya’s performances enact and reframe hegemonies, she works with materials that exemplify our deep entanglement with petro-culture and technology’s effect on consciousness. She has worked on projects at Eyebeam, 3LD, the Netherlands Institute voor Media Kunst, Steim, ARS Electronica, Games for Learning Institute, The Guggenheim (NYC), The National Mall and has taught at GAFFTA, MoMA, NYU, Srishti, and the Rubin Museum. She is a PhD Candidate in Music Composition at NYU GSAS.

Ms. Yuditskaya Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on an in-depth, detailed and immersive study of global Noise Music through the lens of the remarkable contemporary Indian contribution to it. Noise Music is vitally important to understand its global forms, structures and driving forces. In today’s measured world, it embodies a fulcrum of technology, chaos, and the sublime. Living and studying in Bangalore offers her a deep insight into the ways that South Indian artists listen to and construct Noise Music. Ms. Yuditskaya aims to develop a rich vocabulary for talking about, and teaching Noise, in the framework of traditional music and in conversation with U.S. musical output.

Theo Whitcomb

Mr. Theo Whitcomb is a writer and journalist from Southern Oregon. He has covered land use and natural resource politics for over two years, focusing on water, law enforcement, and cannabis agriculture. His writing has been published in national and regional magazines. In 2019, while in India, he began researching and writing about river restoration and land use in Chennai – a subject topic which the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship will continue to support this year.

While in South India for the second time, Mr. Whitcomb is interested in understanding how multinational companies, local social movements, and investors are shaping the politics, economics, and ecology of the region. His research will focus on studying the challenges and politics of Chennai to navigate a disaster-prone climate. To do this, he will work with scholars at the Madras Institute for Development Studies.

Working with scholars at Chennai’s Madras Institute for Development Studies, Mr. Whitcomb’s Fulbright-Nehru research focuses on the politics and infrastructure of ‘climate adaptation.’ He is interested in how multinational companies and international development investment is shaping the politics, economics, and ecology of the Coromandel coast.

Thomas Varner

Mr. Thomas Varner, Originally from Northern Indiana, graduated from the School of Engineering at the University of Mississippi with a B.Sc. in Geology in 2018. During his time as an undergraduate in Mississippi, his interest in the natural processes that shape our planet’s surface flourished while investigating the extent of uranium decay in detrital zircons to unravel the ancestral pathway of the Mississippi River. These research endeavors led to Mr. Varner receiving the Who’s Who Award at the University of Mississippi and directed Mr. Varner towards graduate research addressing water-related issues impacting societies across the globe.

Mr. Varner is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at San Antonio where his research focuses the transportation of arsenic along tidally fluctuating river systems in Bangladesh, a region where millions of people are negatively impacted by elevated concentrations of arsenic in the underlying aquifers used for drinking purposes. Facets of Mr. Varner’s research have been presented at numerous conferences including the Geological Society of America, American Geophysical Union, Goldschmidt, and the International Congress & Exhibition on Arsenic in the Environment. The culmination of Mr. Varner’s research, titled “Contribution of Sedimentary Organic Matter to Arsenic Mobilization along a Potential Natural Reactive Barrier (NRB) near a River: The Meghna River, Bangladesh” was published in Chemosphere. Mr. Varner is passionate about investigating the occurrence and transportation of inorganic and organic contaminants in drinking water systems with an aim to provide options for in-situ remediation in natural environments.

Mr. Varner, as part of the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, is researching a naturally occurring phenomena along the tidally fluctuating Hooghly River leading to the precipitation of iron in the adjacent sediments which may protect the river and aquifer from the cross-contamination of arsenic and other pollutants. This phenomenon is known as the “Iron Curtain” and is the result of the surface water-groundwater mixing within the sediments surrounding the river. The results from this study will be compared to the subsequent findings from a similar study along the Meghna River in Bangladesh. Together, these studies will be used to develop a universal river-aquifer contaminant transport model.

John (Ike) Uri

Mr. John Uri is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Brown University. He earned his BA in Sociology from the University of Kansas in 2017, before serving as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Tajikistan. He earned an MA in Sociology at Brown University in 2020. For his master’s thesis, Mr. Uri conducted interview-based research in India, working to understand how climate adaptation – efforts to reduce vulnerability to climate change – occurs in Indian cities. Such efforts are often funded by international donors, and that project illustrated how consultants, positioned between these donors and local urban officials, are a necessary part of urban adaptation planning in India. With the support of this Fulbright grant, Mr. Uri’s dissertation research will focus on these consultants and their role in urban climate adaptation, considering adaptation efforts in the city of Mumbai.

Apart from these primary research interests, Mr. Uri has conducted research at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conferences (the UN climate negotiations). In this capacity, Mr. Uri has considered the negotiations from a critical perspective, paying particular attention to the topics of climate finance and adaptation, as well as the nascent issue of loss and damage.

Cities in India face intensifying risks from the climate crisis, necessitating climate adaptation (actions and policies that reduce climate vulnerability). Urban adaptation planning is increasingly common in India, often carried out by consultants. This Fulbright-Nehru project intends to focus on these consultants, who coordinate the interests of international donors and urban officials. Using ethnographic research methods, Mr. Uri aims to embed himself in a firm in Mumbai that provides these services. The goal of this project is to better understand the ‘best practices’ of urban adaptation planning and how international norms and features of local governance impact those practices.

Maya Taylor

Ms. Maya Nashva Lyon Taylor graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in Public Health and Asian Studies and a minor in Spanish. In her time as a student, she was a Research Assistant in Dr. Gilbert Gonzales’ LGBTQ+ health laboratory. Ms. Taylor’s specific interest in the health of bisexual folks, like herself, led her to study how having a same-sex or opposite-sex partner could impact the mental health, physical health, and substance use of bi+ folks across the United States. Under Dr. Gonzales’ mentorship, Ms. Taylor published a paper that encapsulated this work entitled, “Health Disparities Among Women by Sexual Orientation Identity and Same-Sex or Different-Sex Cohabiting Partnership Status” in the journal Women’s Health Issues.

While taking a semester to study in Delhi, Ms. Taylor began studying how the 2019 Transgender Persons Protection of Rights Act mandating folks to get surgery in order to change their legal gender marker was affecting trans and other gender diverse folk in India. She spoke to several trans activists and medical providers and documented their experiences. Ms. Taylor plans to continue and expand this work during her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship. In the last year of college, Ms. Taylor wrote a thesis applying medical sociology theories of historical trauma to the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. As a part of her thesis, she wrote a short story about an Indian doctor treating patients dying of HIV/AIDS in New York City whose physician parents lived through the Partition and participated in mass sterilization campaigns of the Emergency era. After graduation, Ms. Taylor worked as a Health Educator at the Center on Halsted, a social service agency in Chicago, providing HIV testing, PrEP Navigation, and Care Coordination for her clients in English and Spanish. In her free time, Ms. Taylor loves to try cooking new dishes, playing instruments, and going for hikes.

Under the 2019 Transgender Person’s (Protection of Rights) Act, discrimination against trans people is criminalized. Despite these protections, the Act requires trans/gender diverse Indians to undergo surgery before they can legally change their gender. This study aims to determine how the Act impacts the health of transgender communities by investigating how legal documentation of gender shapes access to health resources, how healthcare providers are held accountable for providing high quality gender-affirming care, how trans and gender diverse people hope to change this Act to better reflect their needs, and how this Act impacts gender diverse visibility in society.

Meredith Stinger

Ms. Meredith Stinger has a Bachelor’s in Sociology & Anthropology with a minor in Political Economy from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR. After graduating, Ms. Stinger was an Americorps VISTA member at a Portland nonprofit, building and managing community relationships to broaden educational opportunities for underserved students of color. As an undergraduate, she was an editor for the Synergia Journal of Gender and Thought Expression, studied abroad in India, and was awarded honors for her senior thesis research in 2019.

Prior to the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Stinger has worked as a Program Coordinator for an equity-focused education nonprofit, specializing in graphic design, marketing and data management. Ms. Stinger enjoys drawing, design, sewing and running in her spare time.

Ms. Stinger’s Fulbright-Nehru research explores the role that India’s Aadhaar biometric identification system has played in accessing healthcare resources throughout the COVID-19 pandemic as well as in efforts to track the virus through contact tracing. The use of biometrics and digital identification for resource allocation and contact-tracing is a topic of international discussion and funding, with high-stakes implications for those navigating these new systems. Ms. Stinger seeks to engage in this international discourse through research on how Indian citizens pursue state healthcare resources in the midst of a major public health crisis, and how their strategies are facilitated and/or impeded by the Aadhaar program.