Meet Our USA Fulbrighters Archive - Page 13 of 40

Ravindra Duddu

Originally from India, Dr. Ravindra Duddu got his BTech in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Subsequently, he obtained his MS and PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Northwestern University. After that he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics and Columbia University in the City of New York. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Vanderbilt University, with secondary appointments in Mechanical Engineering and Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Dr. Duddu’s research interests and work experience are in the area of computational solid mechanics with an emphasis on fracture mechanics and multi-physics modeling of material damage evolution. His research is interdisciplinary and spans the disciplines of engineering mechanics, earth and environmental sciences, applied mathematics, and scientific computing. Specific application interests include: fracture of glaciers ice and ice shelves, delamination of fiber reinforced composites, and corrosion/fracture of metal alloys. He is an author on 35 peer-reviewed journal articles with more than 1000 citations, and has a h-index of 16. He has generated more than $1.5 million in grants from federal agencies and industry, and has mentored several post doctorate, graduate and undergraduate students in his research group.

Dr. Duddu is a recipient of the US National Science Foundation CAREER award and the Royal Society International Exchanges travel award. He also received the Junior Faculty Teaching Fellowship at Vanderbilt University and the US Office of Naval Research Summer Faculty Fellowship. He is a member of ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute, American Geophysical Union, and United States Association for Computational Mechanics.

The goal of Dr. Duddu’s Fulbright-Kalam project is to expand and strengthen collaborations between his research group at Vanderbilt University and the faculty and students of the Center of Excellence (CoE) on Subsurface Mechanics at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM). The project’s research aim is to develop state-of-the-art computationally efficient schemes for solving fracture mechanics problems encountered in Earth, Environmental and Energy Sciences, through a combination of teaching (seminars and short-courses) and research activities (involving PhD students) at the CoE. These schemes will be tailored to study the plausible mechanisms triggering ice-rock avalanches and identify the vulnerabilities of Himalayan glaciers.

Jerry Anthony

Dr. Jerry Anthony, PhD, FAICP, is a global changemaker. Anthony has a bachelor’s degree in Architecture, a master’s degree in Town Planning, and a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning. He is a tenured faculty member at the School of Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Iowa, a Carnegie-1 and AAU institution in the US

Dr. Anthony teaches courses in Sustainable Development, Housing Policy, Land Use Planning, Urban Growth Management, and International Planning. He has been named an Excellent Educator by the American Planning Association. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 2015-2019. He has won numerous teaching awards at the University of Iowa. Students consistently rate his courses very highly, regard him as an outstanding teacher, and describe his classes to be life-transforming.

Dr. Anthony’s research interests are in housing policy and land use planning in the US and international contexts. His current research projects include a) the effects of high housing costs on economic growth in the largest U.S. cities, b) the rebuilding of the American city of Cedar Rapids after a devasting flood, c) methods to increase the replacement of traditional wood-burning cookstoves (chulhas) in India, and d) climate change responsive urbanism in India. He was named a HUD Urban Scholar in 2002. His publications are widely read, with a 2004 paper titled “The Effects of Florida’s Growth Management Act on Housing Affordability” named one of the top 10 most influential papers published in the Journal of the American Planning Association in 25 years. His research has been funded by numerous entities, including the Brookings Institution, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the US Department of Housing & Urban Development.

In 2003, he co-founded the Housing Trust Fund of Johnson County that to date has distributed about $12 million to help build over 900 reasonably-priced homes in Iowa. In 2019, Dr. Anthony was given the University of Iowa’s Michael J. Brody award for Excellence in Service.

In 2020, Dr. Anthony was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners – the highest honor for urban planners in the U.S.

Cities are significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Fortunately, cities are better resourced financially than rural areas, bring together people with varied skills and are crucibles for innovation. These advantages could be combined to facilitate sustainable urbanism. Many scholars believe that the war to stave off catastrophic climate change will be won or lost in cities. Much of the world’s urban population lives in the global South, where cities are expanding rapidly. Modifying the development patterns of these cities while they are growing affords significant opportunities for a sustainable future for humankind. Dr. Anthony, in his Fulbright-Kalam project, plans to document the climate change mitigating efforts of several Indian cities, assessing their effectiveness, and exploring their transferability to cities in other countries.

Abhijeet Paul

Dr. Abhijeet Paul is lecturer in South and Southeast Asian studies at UC Berkeley and lecturer in ethnic studies in the Peralta Community College District. He is also affiliated faculty in the Contemporary Center on India, a research body at UC Berkeley. Dr. Paul teaches and researches South Asian, ethnic, and global studies, specializing in environmental justice and humanities, South Asian and Asian-American literatures and cultures, as well as environmental media. He is currently a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow affiliated with West Bengal State University researching the jute community, environmental justice, and globalization for a monograph to be completed in 2023–24. He has published several articles on: jute culture, ecology, and community; digital community and fakes; and biopolitics and seed sovereignty. He has made presentations in numerous conferences in India, the US, and Europe, and has been interviewed by the National Public Radio of Washington, D.C., and New Philosopher of Australia. He plans to premiere his film, Bhatti (The Kiln) in India in 2022. He has a PhD in South and Southeast Asian studies with a designated emphasis on critical theory from UC Berkeley and a PhD in English (American literature) from the University of Calcutta. His first Fulbright experience was as an Indian doctoral researcher in the US, and the second as a Fulbright-Nehru US scholar in India. He loves to travel and meet people.

Jute, Bengal’s “golden fiber”, is rooted in sustainability and well suited to local agroecologies; its cultivation has the potential for carbon sequestration and soil restoration, while jute products are environmentally friendly and compostable. Dr. Paul’s Fulbright-Hays project is exploring the local, cultural, and community aspects of jute’s reinvention as a green commodity in order to understand sustainability practices, climate change, and the challenges of adapting to new technologies. The project is examining the many roles of the jute plant in the oral and written cultural forms of India and South Asia. These self-representations by farmers and workers complement and complicate the scientific-technological narratives of agroecology, diversification, and global jute marketing.

Anjana Mishra

Prof. Anjana Mishra is assistant teaching professor in the Department of Politics & International Relations, School of International and Public Affairs, Florida International University (FIU), Miami. She joined FIU as an adjunct professor in 1998. Prior to that, she taught at the University of Lucknow and NSN Degree College, Lucknow, India. At FIU, she teaches courses on South Asia, development studies, and global issues. Dr. Mishra’s research interests include issues related to the Asian Indian diaspora, gender, development, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. She is currently editing a book, Politics and Culture in the Developing World. Dr. Mishra is active in the South Florida community and is a member of the Miami Dade County Asian Advisory Board; she is also the secretary, executive board member, and founding member of the Miami Association of Indian Americans for Culture and Arts.

Prof. Mishra’s interdisciplinary project for the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Award involves a survey exploring the impact of globalization and COVID-19 on the empowerment of chikan artisans – Urdu-speaking, Muslim women – living in the city of Lucknow. Using quantitative and qualitative research methods, this study is assessing the improvement, decline, or status quo in the empowerment of these women in the face of threat from machine-made Chinese chikan fabric and the more recent challenge presented by the loss of wages and health issues arising from the pandemic-related lockdown.

Sunila Kale

Prof. Sunila S. Kale is associate professor of international studies at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching focus on Indian and South Asian politics, energy studies, the political economy of development, and the history of capitalism. She is the author of Electrifying India (Stanford, 2014), Mapping Power (OUP, 2018), and “Rural Land Dispossession in China and India” (Journal of Peasant Studies, 2020). She completed her BA from the University of Chicago and her PhD from the University of Texas.

In 2020, India’s Railway Ministry announced that the railways would resurrect the practice of selling chai (tea) to its millions of customers the old-fashioned way, in kulhads, the small mud-clay cups that are meant to be used once and discarded. Prof. Kale’s Fulbright research asks whether and how policies such as the kulhad program support and reproduce modes of informal, artisanal work that persist despite developmental ideologies that have long predicted their demise. In her project, she is focusing on small-scale, labor-intensive informal production in urban India by looking at the work of traditional potters, or kumbhars, in western India.

Rebecca Waxman

Ms. Rebecca Waxman is a PhD candidate at UCLA in the Department of History, specializing in South Asia and with a concentration in gender studies. Her work aims to study occurrences of sexual and gender-based violence that marked turning-point moments in colonial and postcolonial Indian social, political, and feminist histories. Ms. Waxman received her BA in history with a certificate in South Asian Studies from Wesleyan University in 2016, where she wrote her honors thesis historicizing the Delhi Gang Rape of 2012. Her work has been published in Women’s History Review and A Cultural Encyclopedia of Lost Cities and Civilizations (forthcoming).

Ms. Waxman’s dissertation project historicizes the relationship between the interpersonal, violent act of rape and the broader Indian society and politics, exploring how colonial categories and dynamics shaped understandings and legislation of female sexuality and of sexualized violence in British and independent India. It also studies the continuities and discontinuities between colonial and postcolonial India regarding rape. Ms. Waxman’s research endeavors to illuminate key nodes in the complex heterogeneous history of sexual violence in modern South Asia in order to recuperate the subjecthood of Indian women who enter the archive in moments of violation; it also aims to question the dominant knowledge structures informing the subjugation of women.

Carolisa Watson

Ms. Carolisa Watson is currently pursuing a PhD in geography at the University of Kansas. Her research revolves around questions of placemaking, home, and identity. She is engaged in collaborative ethnographic work with displaced communities. Ms. Watson has previously received FLAS funding to study Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese languages. She holds bachelor’s degrees in East Asian languages and literatures and in global and international studies from the University of Kansas; she also holds an MA in folklore and ethnomusicology from Indiana University.

Ms. Watson’s Fulbright-Hays project is examining how Tibetan identity is expressed through placemaking in Dharamsala and the ways in which place and identity interact. As a visiting scholar, Ms. Watson is involved in archival and ethnographic fieldwork exploring the relationships between Tibetans, Dharamsala, and the governmental organizations, and how they impact the Tibetan diaspora in Dharamsala; the project is being carried out by studying the historical, contemporary, political, and social contexts of “territorialized exile” in a city. It is also drawing upon an interdisciplinary background in geography, folklore, religious studies, and media studies to understand how individuals interact with their larger communities and the city itself to create meaningful places and express collective and individual identity.

Taryn Williams

Ms. Taryn Williams is currently a head teacher and secondary generalist with the Lake and Peninsula School District in remote Alaska. She is a former Fulbright Fellow to Germany and a Kathryn Davis Fellow for Peace at Middlebury College. This past summer, she was a WWI Fellow through the National Endowment for the Humanities at the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City. Ms. Williams also serves as her district’s student government advisor and as treasurer of her local National Education Association.

Ms. Williams got her BS in urban studies (with a focus on urban education) from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 and her MSEd in elementary education from the same university in 2015; she also earned a certification in K-12 TESOL. Additionally, she completed a certificate through the Strategic Leadership in Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania in 2021.

Her goal for her Fulbright DAST in India is to share and compare knowledge about the best practices in curriculum and assessment design, and learn about Indian culture. She is also teaching people about the unique and beautiful location she calls home: the Alaskan bush.