Meet Our USA Fulbrighters Archive - Page 27 of 38

Dharmendra Saraswat

Dr. Dharmendra Saraswat is an associate professor in the Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE) Department at Purdue University. He received a bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering from Sam Higginbottom Institute of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences (SHUATS); a master’s degree in agricultural engineering from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi, and a PhD in food, agricultural, and biological engineering from The Ohio State University.

Before coming to Purdue, Dr. Saraswat was a faculty member at the University of Arkansas, a scientist at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, New Delhi, and an assistant professor at Chandra Shekhar Azad University of Agriculture & Technology, Kanpur.

Dr. Saraswat conducts research in information technology for agriculture. He has been pursuing two areas of emphasis within agriculture: watershed modeling; and digital agriculture. He applies engineering and science principles to measure, model, and develop digital solutions. Dr. Saraswat’s research demonstrates the application of GIS, remote sensing, and open-source software for creating new technologies, decision-support tools, and data sets to manage the environment and agricultural production systems.

Dr. Saraswat’s overall research and extension efforts have been recognized on a sustained basis. He has received several awards, including the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award (2023), Excellence in Multistate Research Team Award from USDA-NIFA for the S1069 project (2022), Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award from Purdue ABE (2022), Outstanding Educator Award by SHUATS (2021), the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers’ (ASABE) ITSC Best Paper Award (2019), ASABE Standards Award (2018), ASABE Educational Aids Blue Ribbon Award (2017, 2015, and 2013), the American Society of Horticultural Sciences’ Outstanding App Award (2016), Southern Region-American Society of Horticultural Sciences’ Blue Ribbon Extension Communication Award (2016 and 2012), the Fellow of Indian Society of Agricultural Engineers (2014), John W. White Outstanding Extension State Faculty Award by the University of Arkansas (2014), and Excellence in Remote Sensing and Precision Agriculture Award from the National Association of County Agricultural Agents (2013).

Dr. Saraswat’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is focusing on applying deep learning methods to identify and study the spread pattern of bacterial blight in rice and develop a conceptual modeling framework for creating an early warning system. Besides, Dr. Saraswat is collaborating with colleagues at IARI to share experiences with curriculum design and classroom delivery for spatial data science courses to augment the existing curriculum for developing students’ analytical, problem-solving, computational, and decision-making skills and abilities.

Shalini Puri

Prof. Shalini Puri has a PhD from Cornell University and is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests span postcolonial, Caribbean, gender, and memory studies; indentureship, slavery, and incarceration; environmental humanities; and social movements. She is especially interested in interdisciplinary and fieldwork-based humanities methods that explore the intersection of the arts, everyday life, and social justice.

Prof. Puri co-founded the Pitt Prison Education Project. She is the author of The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory and the award-winning The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. She has co-edited Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South and several other books. She also edits Palgrave Macmillan’s New Caribbean Studies series. Currently, she is working on a book titled “Poetics for Freshwater Justice”.

As part of her Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Puri is collaborating with scholars at Ashoka University to explore how a comparative study of the Caribbean and India can reframe postcolonial studies and build enduring mechanisms for south–south exchange. The specific foci of the collaboration is research, teaching, advising, and capacity building to facilitate a cross-regional study of migration, environmentalisms, and water justice using the lens of literature and interdisciplinary humanities.

Sulapha Peethamparan

Dr. Sulapha Peethamparan is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Clarkson University, New York. She received her PhD from Purdue University, MEng from the National University of Singapore, MS from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and BTech from Mahatma Gandhi University, all in civil engineering. Prior to joining Clarkson University, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University. Dr. Peethamparan has over 15 years of research and teaching experience in cement, aggregate, and concrete materials. Her recent work involves various aspects of the development of alternative or low carbon concrete such as high-volume fly ash concrete, bio-cement concrete, alkali-activated or geopolymers concrete. The primary objectives of these studies are to determine the fresh, hardened, and durability performances of such low carbon concrete and their underlying physiochemical mechanisms. Her expertise also includes CO2/NOx sequestration technologies in concrete. Dr. Peethamparan’s research work has been supported by various agencies that include the National Science Foundation, the Federal Highway Administration, New York State Energy Research and Department Authority, and New York State Pollution Prevention Institute. She has authored/co-authored over 100 technical papers and reports. Dr. Peethamparan is also an associate editor of the ASCE Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering, chair of the Concrete Research Counsel at the American Concrete Institute, and fellow of the American Concrete Institute. She is a recipient of the 2010 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development award.

The environmental impact of CO2 emission from portland cement production and the role of the concrete industry in global warming sparked the need to develop more sustainable, alternative low carbon concrete for construction. India, the second-largest cement producer in the world, reported an emission of over 250 million metric tons of CO2 in the year 2020. The main objective of this Fulbright research is to explore the viability of producing low carbon portland cement-free geopolymer concrete using locally available industrial byproducts in India and solid alkali activators through the one-part alkali activation technology. In her project, Dr. Peethamparan is also developing new course material covering several alternative cement technologies.

Ram Mohan

Prof. Ram Mohan earned a bachelor’s (honors) in chemistry from Hansraj College in Delhi; a master’s in organic chemistry from the University of Delhi; and a doctorate in organic chemistry from the University of Maryland, Baltimore. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and started his career at Illinois Wesleyan University (IWU) in 1996 where he is currently the Wendell and Loretta Hess Professor of Chemistry. Professor Mohan has taught a variety of courses at IWU ranging from nursing chemistry to organic chemistry, advanced organic chemistry, and a physical science course titled “Better Living through Green Chemistry”. Due to his efforts, there has been a significant reduction in the waste generated in the chemistry labs at IWU and also in the use of toxic chemicals; he has also been responsible for the greening of the labs. His research focuses on green organic synthesis using bismuth compounds. His contributions in this field have led to a surge in popularity of bismuth compounds worldwide.

Prof. Mohan has published 66 manuscripts, the majority co-authored by IWU students, and many highly cited. He has also facilitated the receipt of over USD 1 million in external funding. Besides, he has given over 130 talks in 16 countries. He is also the recipient of several awards, including: the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry Young Observer Award; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County 2002 Distinguished Alumni Award; the Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award; the Pfizer Pharmaceuticals Green Chemistry Award; the Chemist of the Year 2011 title; the Fulbright Teacher Scholar Award 2012; and the American Chemical Society’s Committee on Environmental Improvement Award for Incorporating Sustainability into Chemistry Education.

Prof. Mohan’s Fulbright-Nehru project is pursuing both teaching and research in India. At St. Joseph’s University in Bangalore, he is teaching a course on green chemistry, while in the research component, he is collaborating with Professor Chelvam Venkatesh at the Indian Institute of Technology Indore. The goal of the research is to develop environmentally friendly synthesis of molecules for HIV diagnosis. In addition, a lecture series titled “Better Living through the Practice of Green Chemistry” is being offered in many colleges and universities across India, especially in the rural areas.

Nandini Deo

Dr. Nandini Deo is an associate professor of political science at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. She is the author of Mobilizing Religion and Gender in India, the co-author (along with Duncan McDuie Ra) of The Politics of Collective Advocacy in India: Tools and Traps, and has edited a volume called Postsecular Feminisms: Gender and Religion in Transnational Perspective. Currently, she is finishing work on a monograph on civil society and corporate collaboration in India. In 2022, Dr. Deo was awarded Lehigh’s highest teaching award. She is also an advocate of student collaboration in curriculum development and her latest interest is in unconventional educational experiments – unschooling and self-directed education.

In Mumbai, as part of her Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Deo is sharing findings from her research on the aftermath of the 2013 revisions to the Indian Companies Act which created a new arena of corporate social responsibility. These revisions require large corporations to donate at least 2 per cent of their annual profits to social causes and strongly encourage them to partner with NGOs. The result has been a huge influx of corporate funding and influence in the social inclusion and sustainable development spheres. Through her project, based on insights from business leaders, NGO activists, and the new intermediaries who connect them, Dr. Deo is showing that this influence is not reciprocal – that is, corporate social responsibility seems to change NGOs more than it changes the businesses involved in it. Besides, as an award-winning teacher, she is also sharing exciting pedagogical approaches with colleagues who want to explore “ungrading” and “student-centered” and “active learning” curriculum designs. She is expecting that her work will build connections with the faculty in India wherein an annual U.S.–India course can be created and co-taught which will benefit the students of both her home and host universities.

Nitya (Deepa) Das Acevedo

Dr. Deepa Acevedo is a legal anthropologist and a law and society scholar. Her research blends ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological theory with doctrinal and policy analysis to provide new insights into legal rules and institutions. Dr. Acevedo is an associate professor of law at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her JD and PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago and her BA in politics from Princeton. Her monograph, The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2023. Her articles have been published or are forthcoming in, among others, Law & Social Inquiry, Duke Law Journal, the American Journal of Comparative Law, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the Asian Journal of Law and Society, and Modern Asian Studies. She has also guest-edited several special collections: a pair of issues in Alabama Law Review and Law & Social Inquiry focusing on interdisciplinary engagements between law and anthropology; a virtual issue in Law & Society Review on legal anthropology (with Anna Offit); and a collection on “constitutional ethnography” appearing via ICONnect – the blog of the International Journal of Constitutional Law.

Constitutions are documents for everyday life. Despite this, the study of constitutional law remains largely cabined to rarified contexts, elite actors, and written materials. Dr. Acevedo’s Fulbright-Nehru project is connecting the theoretically weighty field of constitutional law with the nuanced empirical insights afforded by anthropology to show how a diverse collection of Indian actors define, refine, and mobilize their national charter. In particular, Dr. Acevedo’s project is using the recently popular concept of “constitutional morality” to explore how ordinary citizens engage with and mobilize their Constitution.

Karen Daniels

Prof. Karen Daniels is a distinguished professor of physics at North Carolina State University. She received her BA in physics from Dartmouth College in 1994, taught middle and high school for several years, and then pursued a PhD in physics from Cornell University. After receiving her doctorate in 2002, she moved to North Carolina to do research at Duke University and then joined the faculty at NC State in 2005. In 2011–2012, she received an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship which allowed her to spend the year conducting research at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany. She has served as chair of the American Physical Society Division on Soft Matter, and as divisional associate editor for Physical Review Letters, and currently serves on the editorial board of the Annual Reviews of Condensed Matter Physics. She is also a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Her main research interests center around experiments on the non-equilibrium and nonlinear dynamics of granular materials, fluids, and gels. These experiments have allowed her lab to address questions of how failure occurs, how non-trivial patterns arise, and what controls the transitions between different types of flows or material properties. When not working with her students on experiments in the lab, Prof. Daniels likes to spend time in the outdoors, which leads her to contemplate on the implications of her research for geological and ecological systems. In her work, she has often idealized systems to provide insights into industrial and natural processes of interest to engineers and earth scientists.

In her Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, Prof. Daniels is collaborating with scientists and engineers – both at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and beyond – on the mechanics of granular materials, a class of materials such as soils, agricultural grains, and pharmaceutical powders which exhibit both solid-like and liquid-like behaviors. Her aims are to investigate the regime near the transition in those behaviors; develop new experiments which quantify the mechanisms through which the inclusion of rigid fibers modifies the material’s strength; and make flow predictions through both statistical and continuum models. In teaching IISc students, she is developing open-source teaching materials with a focus on experimental methods.

Neelima Chauhan

Dr. Neelima Chauhan obtained her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in life sciences with physiology and biochemistry majors, and a bachelor’s degree in education and psychology from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India. After migrating to the U.S., she received her postdoctoral training in neurotoxicology at Oregon Health Science University and in molecular neurobiology and neurodegeneration at Loyola University Chicago.

After successful completion of postdoctoral trainings, she obtained an independent joint position as assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and as research biologist with Veterans Affairs (VA). She then became an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics at UIC where she also served as a faculty for the graduate program in neuroscience. Besides, she worked as the neuroscience program director at Jesse Brown VA Medical Center.

Dr. Chauhan has directed research projects funded by VA and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in translational neuroscience, with a major focus on Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic brain injury. She has presented over 100 abstracts and published over 50 peer-reviewed articles, over six reviews, and more than five book chapters. She has also served on the editorial boards of many neuro-biomedical Journals.

Besides, Dr. Chauhan has served on various institutional administrative committees including the Institutional Biosafety Committee and the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. She has also served as a reviewer on RRD6 VA MERIT REVIEW Study Section and on NIH Grant Study Sections. She is a member of many professional societies such as the Society for Neuroscience, the American Society for Neurochemistry, and the International Society for Alzheimer’s & Dementia.

Dr. Chauhan’s Fulbright-Nehru project is evaluating the therapeutic potential of Indian classical music – by virtue of its unique melodic/rhythmic structure – in treating age-associated neuropsychiatric disorders.

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