Archives: Meet Our USA Fulbrighters

Kathleen Mulligan

Prof. Kathleen Mulligan is a Professor of voice and speech in the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance at Ithaca College. She is a member of Actors Equity Association, the union of professional actors. She earned her BFA in acting from Boston University and her MFA in Performance from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. In 2010, Prof. Mulligan was a Fulbright grantee to Kerala, India with her project Finding Women’s Voices, focused on the empowerment of women through voice. This led to a Fulbright Specialist grant to Pakistan, where she first considered the idea of creating an original theatre piece about Partition. In 2015, a U.S. Embassy grant allowed Prof. Mulligan and her husband, Actor and Director David Studwell, to collaborate with Islamabad’s Theatre Wallay on the project Voices of Partition, drawing on interviews with Partition survivors to devise the original play Dagh Dagh Ujala (This Stained Dawn.) Dagh Dagh Ujala opened in Islamabad and toured to the .U.S with stops in Boston, Ithaca, and the US Department of State in Washington DC before returning home for closing performances in Lahore. In 2017, Mulligan and Studwell again joined with Theatre Wallay along with U.S. playwright Linda Alper for a new project titled On Common Ground. This original piece, exploring the effect of violence on public space, toured to the western US with stops at Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, OR and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. It then returned home to perform in several cities across Pakistan. Prof. Mulligan’s acting career has brought her to every state in the US, performing such roles as Prospero in The Tempest, Jocasta in Oedipus, Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Lucy in Sweeney Todd. Most recently, she traveled to Beirut, Lebanon to perform her one-woman show The Belle of Amherst (written by William Luce and based on the life of New England poet Emily Dickinson) as a guest of the American University in Beirut. She is eager to continue offering this performance to audiences in India and around the globe.

The partition of India and Pakistan resulted in the death of over one million and caused the largest forced migration the world has ever seen. History books tell the stories of leaders and governments that brought about Partition—but little of the people whose lives were lost or changed forever. Drawing on interviews with survivors and their families, Prof. Mulligan intends to work with young people through her Fulbright-Nehru project to create an original theatre piece that preserves the human stories of Partition. By experiencing live theatre, whether as creators or audience members, young people in India will connect with the stories of those who came before them to better understand themselves and the world they live in.

Amal Mitra

Dr. Amal Mitra is a Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Jackson State University (JSU), Jackson, MS, USA. He obtained his Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) and Master of Public Health (MPH) degrees from University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL. He received his Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) degree from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Prior to joining JSU, he worked as a senior medical officer and associate scientist at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research (icddrb), Bangladesh, where he started his research career in clinical medicine as well as in public health. Dr. Mitra is a recipient of external funding from numerous agencies including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of Agriculture (DOA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Susan G. Komen Foundation, the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC). He is also a recipient of many awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award 2013, the Innovation Award for Applied Research 2004, and the Distinguished Faculty Researcher Award 1999.

Dr. Mitra’s Fulbright-Nehru research project focuses on adolescents’ mental health in relation to COVID-19. Demographic data, family history of COVID-19, and any other physical and mental illnesses of the participants (such as depression, anxiety, behavioral changes, sleep disturbances, and addictions) will be collected. The participants will be screened for mental health status using Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ)-9 and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)-7 scales. The overall impact of human losses due to COVID-19 in West Bengal will be assessed. In addition, Dr. Mitra will offer a graduate-level course on Epidemiology of COVID-19, and hands-on training on statistical analysis of data.

Narayanan Kuthirummal

Dr. Narayanan Kuthirummal is a physics professor and most of his academic career has been spent at the College of Charleston (CofC) having around 10,000 students with about 5% graduate students. He is currently on his second term as Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at CofC. Dr. Kuthirummal follows a teacher-scholar model and his current experiences and skill sets include developing effective teaching strategies, developing degree programs (undergraduate and graduate), promoting experiential learning, recruitment, promoting diversity, and developing connections with industries. He received his PhD in Physics from Banaras Hindu University, India. Before joining CofC in 2004, Dr. Kuthirummal spent about three years at Brown University (USA) as a Postdoctoral Associate and about five years as postdoctoral fellow at Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Dr. Kuthirummal’s research interests include nanomaterials for energy applications, composite polymer materials for medical applications, and nondestructive evaluation techniques applied to nanomaterials. He has mentored 30 undergraduate research students and published 53 peer-reviewed publications in international journals and about 55 abstracts in national/international conferences. He received the Distinguished Teacher Award of CofC, Norine Noonan Sustained Achievement Award of the School of Sciences and Mathematics, Excellence in Collegiate Education and Leadership (ExCEL) Awards: Outstanding Faculty of the Year for the School of Sciences and Mathematics of the College of Charleston, and is a member of the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society.

The objective of the proposed Fulbright-Nehru project is to engage students and faculty at Farook College in nanotechnology and nanomaterials characterization using nondestructive evaluation methods through a combination of teaching and research with emphasis on graphene-based nanocomposites. The research component of the proposed project includes synthesis and characterization of modified graphene nanocomposite materials. As part of the proposal, a course on “Nanotechnology and Advanced Nondestructive Evaluation Methods” will be developed and taught following a student-centered approach. Students will be introduced to the process of research through data analysis, interpretation, and to developing research questions and writing scientific proposals.

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.

Thomas Boving

Dr. Thomas Boving is a Professor of Hydrogeology at the University of Rhode Island, USA. Born in Germany, he studied Geology at the University of Tübingen, Germany. After receiving his PhD in Hydrology and Water Resources from the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA, in 1999, he joined the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, USA, where he maintains a joint appointment in the Department of Geosciences and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Dr. Boving is as an expert in the field of soil and groundwater remediation and is the co-author of the leading textbook in his field. He published over 80 work products, including peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and a book. His work is cited over 5,000 times. Dr. Boving’s research focuses on the fate and transport of legacy and emerging contaminants and their remediation, using novel treatment technologies. He also researches sustainable, community operated water treatment systems, such as riverbank filtrations technology, and their application in underserved rural areas in emerging economies. Besides his work in the US, he collaborates with researchers in North Africa and, for over 15 years, with NGOs and academic institutions in India, Nepal, and Indonesia. He currently serves on several boards of water research and management organizations and directs his university’s Graduate Certificate in Hydrology program. Outside his academic work, Dr. Boving enjoys building wooden furniture and traveling with his family.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Boving seeks to teach and conduct research in hydrogeological remediation science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee, India. Remediation science and engineering in hydrogeology focuses on technologies and practices for the efficient and economic clean-up of polluted (ground)water. Starting in early 2023, Dr. Boving intends to teach the science and engineering fundamentals of groundwater remediation while also collaborating with faculty and students on innovative remediation technology research projects. A key beneficial outcome would be establishing the Department of Civil Engineering at IIT as a hotspot for hydrogeological remediation teaching and research in India.

Swasti Bhattacharyya

Dr. Swasti Bhattacharyya (PhD, RN) has taught Philosophy and Religion for over 20 years. She was Visiting Professor Emerita of Women’s Studies and Ethics and a 2021-2022 WSRP Research Associate at the Harvard Divinity School. Her current long-term ethnographic project explores how current generations are living out Vinoba Bhave’s (Gandhi’s disciple, friend, confidant, and spiritual successor) commitments to Sarvodaya (the holistic uplifting of all life). Her latest publication, “Shiva’s Babies: Hindu Perspectives on the Treatment of High-Risk Newborn Infants” in Religion and Ethics in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (Oxford University Press, 2019) and her book Magical Progeny, Modern Technology (SUNY, 2006) combine her experiences as a registered nurse with her expertise in ethics and the study of religion. Dr. Bhattacharyya is the current Director of the Uberoi Teacher Training Workshop – U.S. She also serves on the advisory board for the Center for Understanding World Religions (Loma Linda University), the American Academy of Religion’s Committee on the Status of Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession, and on the board of the Peace and Justice Studies Association.

Dr. Bhattacharyya’s Fulbright-Nehru project intends to explore the lives and work of the Sisters of the Brahma Vidya Mandir Ashram and three generations of people working for Sarvodaya. Coined by M. K. Gandhi and developed by his disciple, confidant, and spiritual successor Vinoba Bhave, Sarvodaya calls for the holistic uplifting of all life. Dr Bhattacharyya brings the stories and insights of those working for a better world, demonstrates their relevance in multiple contexts, and argues that worldviews grounded in Sarvodaya can bring radical ways of addressing contemporary global challenges, and working for a more just, compassionate, and loving world.

Jill Belsky

Dr. Jill Belsky is Professor Emerita from the University of Montana (UM) where she was a faculty member for 30 years, serving as Chair in the Departments of Sociology and Society and Conservation — the latter an interdisciplinary department in the College of Forestry and Conservation in which she was a founding member. She served as Director of the Bolle Center for People and Forests at UM, and as Editor-in-Chief of her discipline’s flagship journal, Society and Natural Resources. Dr. Belsky received her PhD from Cornell University in 1991 in Rural Sociology with specializations in natural resources, agriculture and southeast studies. She is a nationally and locally award-winning instructor, teaching highly popular classes in society, environment and development, international conservation and development, and political ecology. Her research has been widely published, and focusses on the intersections of rural livelihoods, economy, community-based natural resources and wildlife management, and the political economy of development, conducted often in collaboration with ecological scientists, managers and practitioners across South and Southeast Asia and the US west. She enjoys hiking, Nordic skiing and biking, as well as traveling and staying in mountain villages around the world.

Dr. Belsky’s Fulbright-Nehru project seeks to enhance environmental social science capacity in India through linking interactive and innovative teaching with participant action research (PAR). Both dimensions are informed by social-ecological theory and practice, and cultural/political ecology. The PAR project will collectively address human-wildlife conflicts and livelihood challenges in the Harsil Valley of Uttarakhand. PAR methodology utilizes inclusive, mixed methods to gather data relevant to a range of constituents to develop mutually-beneficial policy and programs, and context-specific, relevant content for class lectures, curriculum development and a workshop at the Wildlife Institute of India.

Sarah Pinto

Prof. Sarah Pinto is a Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. Her research and teaching addresses cultures and histories of biomedicine in South Asia, especially as they pertain to kinship and gender. Most recently she has been working on histories of psychiatry in South Asia, with a focus on diagnoses related to “hysteria.” She is author of three books, Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India (Berghahn 2008), Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India (University of Pennsylvania Press 2014), which was awarded the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize for ethnographic writing on gender and health, and The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis (Women Unlimited 2019/Fordham University Press 2020), and numerous scholarly articles. Her current efforts consider concepts of the “good death” as they emerge in and beyond bioethical framings, highly collaborative models for ethnographic research and teaching, and writing at the intersections of ethnography, history, and fiction.

During her Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Pinto intends to involve several interlinked components: teaching a seminar-style workshop for graduate students, conducting preliminary ethnographic research, and building a collaborative research paradigm for ongoing work. The theme of these efforts is contemporary concepts of “good death” in West Bengal. Amid rapid changes in the Indian medical and legal landscape of end-of-life care, Prof. Pinto asks how ideas about a good death are formed and reformed at the juncture of medicine, law, religion, and everyday life. What does a good death look like in and beyond global bioethical formulations?

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.