Meet Our USA Fulbrighters Archive - Page 7 of 29

Lucas Joshi

Mr. Lucas Cole Joshi is scholar of Afro-Asian studies. Born to an Indian father and biracial mother, Mr. Joshi now attends Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, graduating in the spring of 2022. At Dartmouth, he served as the Founder and Co-President of cultural magazine, Dear Dartmouth and as the Founder and President of (post)-colonial book club, Chapter Two. A recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Mr. Joshi worked alongside undergraduate scholars of color in the production of his own research grounded in themes of mourning and memory in a (post)-colonial lens. His honors thesis, entitled “With Deepest Sympathy, a New Mourning in the Hour of Basque Reconciliation,” complicates notions of victimhood and reconciliation as it would lend itself to the post-terrorism era of the Basque Country. Mr. Joshi is a co-author of the book, Transatlantic Letters: An Epistolary Exchange Between Basque and US Students on Violence and Community published within the Human Rights Collection of Deusto University.

Upon completion of the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Mr. Joshi will pursue his PhD in Comparative Literature at Brown University. At Brown, he will work alongside professors Leela Gandhi and Leila Lenhen in responding to questions of the Indian Ocean as an autonomous body of violation and solidarity. Ultimately, he intends to realign Afro-Asian Studies through an emphasis on critical mixed-race theories and affinities.

A relic of the Portuguese colonial era, Goa’s Civil Code presents a complex story of labor governance and rights, particularly with respect to domestic workers throughout the community. Through this research, Mr. Joshi’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the contemporary conditions that define the lives and livelihoods of domestic workers in Goa. Further, he is contextualizing domestic labor as a continuation of the legacy of Afro-Asian enslavement. The project represents a deeper inquiry into the labor that has stood as the backbone of Goa: once the “Rome of the East” and now the heart of Indian interculturality.

Christian James

Mr. Christian James is a PhD Candidate in Indiana University’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. His dissertation examines the role of musical performance in internationally funded human development initiatives operating within the Kangra District of Himachal Pradesh.

For over a decade, Mr. James has studied cultures and languages of North India with a special interest in folksongs of western Himachal Pradesh and Greater Punjab. He is proficient in four South Asian languages: Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and the Kangri dialect of Western Pahari. He has received multiple awards and fellowships for language and area studies, including two Critical Language Scholarships. With support from the U.S. Department of Education and Indiana University’s Center for the Study of Global Change, Mr. James spent the 2021-2022 academic year enrolled as the sole student in the first ever Kangri language course offered through the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Alongside his dissertation topic, Mr. James’ research interests include language ideology, public folklore, and Indic musicology. In 2021, the Midwestern Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology awarded him the JaFran Jones prize in recognition of his paper, “Nādānusandhān: Sound Studies and its Lexical Genealogy in Hindi-language Music Scholarship.” Mr. James has worked as an Articles Editor for Folklore Forum, the open-access journal of Folklore and Ethnomusicology Publications (also known as Trickster Press). In 2020, he served Traditional Arts Indiana as a contributor and editor for Memory, Art, & Aging, a public-facing resource guide encouraging older adults and elder care workers to engage with folk and traditional arts.

Mr. James has maintained an abiding passion for music throughout his life. In 2014, he completed a Bachelor’s of Music degree in composition from Oberlin Conservatory. His compositions have featured in several international venues, including the Charlotte New Music Festival in North Carolina (2013), Dharamshala International Film Festival in Himachal Pradesh (2014), and the Syndicate for the New Arts in Ohio (2017). He has worked as a choral singer, music educator, and church music director in Ohio and Indiana as well as his home state of Michigan.

Mr. James’ Fulbright-Nehru project investigates the role of participatory song in the feminist social development work of Jagori Rural Charitable Trust, a non-governmental organization operating in the Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh. Through a combination of participant observation, recorded interview, and audiovisual documentation, Mr. James assesses the effects of collective singing on the delivery of the organization’s objectives concerning the social, economic, and political empowerment of women and girls. The final report documents and analyzes the organization’s total song repertoire, the effects of specific songs, and participants’ experiences of those effects through performance.

Rishabh Jain

Mr. Rishabh Jain graduated magna cum laude with Departmental Distinction in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University, where he was elected, in his junior year, to Tau Beta Pi. His research interests have spanned diverse fields, from bioengineering to technology policy to rural healthcare access. His senior thesis work as a Pratt Research Fellow consisted of designing a self-assembling, peptide-based supramolecular vaccine for Zika virus, for which he received the Howard G. Clark Award for Excellence in Research. He has also conducted research on injectable hydrogels for tissue repair after stroke as a Huang Fellow and has published on the pitfalls of thermal facial recognition during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences as a Bass Connections Research Fellow.

Mr. Jain is a contributor to the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s Editor’s Choice section and authored two chapters in an upcoming book on the ocular manifestations of systemic disease. He spent a summer interning at a CAR-T cell company and authoring an investment thesis on cell and gene therapy for a biotechnology-focused venture capital firm.

On campus, Mr. Jain served as Co-Founder and Co-President of the Duke chapter of Remote Area Medical (RAM), a national nonprofit that organizes free pop-up clinics to provide medical, dental, and vision care. With RAM, he led undergraduates and graduate students in multi-dimensional service, research, and advocacy efforts to improve healthcare access for underserved communities, culminating in the deployment of the first RAM clinic in North Carolina.

In his free time, Mr. Jain loves to cook and try new dishes. In 2019, he founded The Black Tile, a pop-up supper club where he served four-course tasting menus to six Duke students at a time. By donating profits to the local food bank, he has been able to provide almost 6000 meals to those in need. He also volunteered with Root Causes, an organization that delivers free, healthy food to food-insecure families.

India has the highest disease burden of uncorrected refractive error (URE) in the world, as measured by disability-adjusted life years. Refractive surgery has been able to vastly improve vision in patients with URE, but there are crucial decisions around the type and parameters of these surgeries that influence patient outcomes and affect postoperative complications. Mr. Jain’s Fulbright-Nehru project is focused on the use of artificial intelligence in refractive surgery, applying deep learning algorithms to the Indian population.

Yasaswini Iyer

Ms. Yasaswini Iyer is dual degree graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemical Biology and an Master’s in Public Health from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio. During her time at CWRU she served as President and Advocacy Chair for Advocates for Cleveland Health (A4CH), a community based organization that addresses public health outcomes through education, advocacy, and volunteering. Ms. Iyer also served as the Vice President of Finance and Director of Academic Achievement for her sorority, Alpha Gamma Delta. She loved the process of teaching and mentorship throughout her academic journey at CWRU and served as a TA for an introductory biology class BIOL 215: Cells and Proteins and an introductory biochemistry class BIOC 328: Introduction to Biochemistry. She received the Outstanding TA award in 2021. Since her freshman year in college, Ms. Iyer explored her interests in research by conducting wet lab research in the Genetics Department at CWRU School of Medicine, Computational Biology research at Georgetown School of Medicine, qualitative survey analysis as a TA for BIOC 328, and Public Health research at the Harrington Heart and Vascular institute. Her diligence to science has awarded her presentations at several conferences and publications.

Ms. Iyer is also a company Bharatanatyam dancer at Natya Dance Theater based out of Chicago, IL. She has been dancing since she was five years old and has performed at several notable venues around the world including Millennium Park, Bharat Kalachar, Navy Pier, HI DC, and Brahma Gana Sabha to name a few. Ms. Iyer follows a plant-based diet and enjoys cooking and trying out new recipes in her free time.

Through her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Iyer is conducting nine months of research assessing public perceptions and knowledge towards air pollution as a cardiovascular risk factor in India. Environmental factors are increasingly related to human health, especially hypertension. She hopes her project will eventually result in the design of culturally sensitive interventions contextualized across socioeconomic gradients. Ms. Iyer is situated in New Delhi, India and collaborating with the CCDC (Center for Disease Control). She is creating/administering questionnaires to probe the public perspectives on the relationship between the two variables. She is excited to engage with a healthcare system different from that of the U.S.

Kyle Hornick

Mr. Kyle Hornick’s interest in India and Buddhist philosophy began when he spent four months studying abroad in Varanasi, India, in the fall of 2019. After leaving, he returned to his home institution, the University of Denver where he finished his final semester and received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics.

In addition to his interest in math, he also explored his artistic nature, taking courses in visual arts whenever possible. His artistic coursework culminated in independent study in graphic novels under the supervision of painter Jeffrey Keith. After his graduation, he chose to further his studies in art and received two years of formal training through the Watts Atelier of the Arts, a school based in Encinitas, California focused on teaching fundamental art skills and traditional painting. Since then, Mr. Hornick has worked on a series of self-directed graphic novel projects, which involved independent research into chosen subject matter, writing, illustrating, and digitally formatting stories like “Shrubby, Self,” and “A Trick of the Light.” Occasionally he finds work in the field of engineering as a technical illustrator where he brings to life the designs of various companies. Besides art, he is interested in the study of language (French and Hindi), world travel, dance, and trekking.

Mr. Hornick is conducting his Fulbright-Nehru project in Dharamshala, India, where he is illustrating the story of Indian and Tibetan preservation efforts of thangka painting with a graphic novel. He hopes to emphasize the Center for Living Buddhist Art’s origin story and will place this narrative in the context of India and Tibet’s shared Buddhist history. His pages in progress will be on display at the Hope Café gallery in Dharamshala and the project will culminate in a final exhibition and panel discussion that will be organized with the help of the Central University of Himachal Pradesh.

Rhône Grajcar

Mr. Rhône Grajcar graduated from Whitman College in 2021 with a Bachelor of Arts in History and South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies. At Whitman he explored South Asian religions and US foreign policy, culminating in eight months spent in India on a David L. Boren Scholarship. He has followed his interests to internships at the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the South Asia Practice at the Albright Stonebridge Group. He is eager to deepen his understanding of South Asia religions and contribute to the study of shrines during his Fulbright-Nehru grant.

Mr. Grajcar’s Fulbright-Nehru project involves ethnographic field work at Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki Dargah in New Delhi and Dargah Yousoufain in Hyderabad, within the dargahs’ compounds. By engaging the dargah attendees in conversation, the project seeks to understand how COVID-19 and its impacts on daily life have affected the sense of community dargahs are renowned for. These shared spaces rely on crowded gatherings and communal food during langar to build their inclusive potentialities, which will present challenges in a post-COVID world. Situating the project in the understanding of dargahs as discursive, rather than fixed spaces, Mr. Grajcar hopes to help capture how these resilient institutions and their exploratory authority weather the disruptions of the pandemic.

Mahishan Gnanaseharan

Mr. Mahishan Gnanaseharan is a burgeoning scholar whose primary research interests lie at the intersection of modern intellectual history, legal philosophy, international relations theory, and global histories of decolonization during the 20th century. He has worked and studied in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Mr. Gnanaseharan graduated from Princeton University in 2020 with a concentration in Political Theory and minors in South Asian Studies and African American Studies. At Princeton, Mr. Gnanaseharan was awarded a Streicker International Fellowship in 2019 to travel to New Delhi and collaborate with scholars at the Centre for Policy Research on research regarding liberalism and secularism in Indian jurisprudence. Mr. Gnanaseharan has also been credited for contributions to Princeton faculty research ranging from analyses of the role of slavery in the founding of the United States to assessments of major political treatises on colonialism, historic injustice, and empire.

Upon graduation, Mr. Gnanaseharan contributed for a brief time to multimillion-dollar litigation efforts as a paralegal at a New York City law firm. Shortly thereafter, he became an MSc candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics. Mr. Gnanaseharan’s postgraduate research has examined how the sizable migration of Tamil laborers from India to Ceylon in the early 20th century informed postcolonial conceptions of international borders and citizenship in South Asia.

Alongside from his research pursuits, Mr. Gnanaseharan is a passionate advocate for global human rights. He has raised concerns about violence against women and girls and the plight of refugees in South Asia before the United States Senate, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the House of Commons in the United Kingdom.

Mr. Gnanaseharan’s Fulbright-Nehru research project maps the political legacies of South India’s ‘Self-Respect’ Movement by highlighting founder E.V. Ramaswamy’s (or ‘Periyar’s’) underexplored intellectual relationships with, among others, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Using his fluency in Tamil, Mr. Gnanaseharan is analyzing the heretofore untranslated writings of Periyar to contextualize the Self-Respect Movement’s historical implications for religious pluralism, democratic politics, and Indian civic identity. Ultimately, this project has the potential to directly inform contemporary public discourse regarding political relationships between South Asian citizens of differing social backgrounds.

Laila Durrani

Ms. Laila Noor Durrani is a recent graduate of Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts. She was born in New York City, and is of Indian origin. She holds a BA in Mathematics and Government, with a focus on global political systems. She has worked for a number of non-profit organizations in northern India, particularly those who work to address gaps in the country’s educational infrastructures, and to improve women’s access to education. Ms. Durrani is interested in the intersections between political conflict and gender disparities, and the ways that political violence often disproportionately infringe upon women’s freedoms and rights, in India, and globally. After her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Durrani hopes to attend graduate school for further her studies in Public Policy and Government, continuing to build upon her academic interests.

Through her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Durrani is investigating the effects of COVID-19 on India’s education systems, examining how the pandemic has exacerbated gender disparities in the realm of educational access, particularly within regions of India which have historically experienced political violence or instability. Ms. Durrani is working with the Observer Research Foundation as well as a number of education-focused non-profit organizations to write a series of proposals to inform future policy with regard to educational access.

Siddhi Deshpande

Ms. Siddhi Deshpande is a graduate of The Pennsylvania State University Schreyer Honors College, where she majored in Neurobiology with minors in Global Health and World Literature. In her time at Penn State, she pursued a variety of interests in public health and medicine. She completed an honors thesis in the Water, Health, and Nutrition lab, titled “Examining Water Insecurity as a Driver of Nutrition Transition Among Tsimane’ Adults in Lowland Bolivia”. Through this thesis, she found that water insecurity was associated with increased consumption of sugary beverages among Tsimane’ in Amazonion Bolivia. Furthermore, the level of market integration also played a role in probability of sugary beverage consumption. Her research in water insecurity, nutrition, and health in a global health setting sparked her interest in conducting similar research in India, which is the reason she applied to the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship! Besides her research, Ms. Deshpande also took a broader interest in environmental health. She co-founded and co-led an organization called Sunrise Movement State College, where she worked with her community to organize local climate demonstrations, advocated for climate justice measures, and campaigned for divestment from the fossil fuel industry. She believes that community-wide advocacy and the will to confront the reality of climate change will help achieve climate justice in our communities.

After completion of the Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Deshpande plans to attend medical school and attain a dual MD/MPH degree. In university, Ms. Deshpande worked as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), where she treated 100+ patients on a 911 ambulance service. Enjoying the work of treating patients but also hoping to serve her community on a larger scale, Ms. Deshpande hopes to combine an education in medicine and public health to serve as a physician who advocates for her community and works towards climate justice. She envisions herself conducting environmental health research and influencing policy alongside her responsibilities in clinical medicine.

In India, growing rates of obesity, insulin resistance and cardiometabolic disease are present alongside malnutrition and hunger across India. Climate change has been understudied in connection to this nutrition transition, despite increased drought across India and a rapid demographic change as a result. Food insecurity is an important mechanism of the consequent public health impacts; Ms. Deshpande plans to investigate how declining agricultural productivity, driven by climate change, causes nutrition transition from undernutrition to obesity among the rural poor. Ms. Deshpande is studying under Dr. Angeline Jeyakumar at Savitraibai Phule Pune University, where she is conducting research in Pune and Latur.

Sonali Deliwala

Ms. Sonali Deliwala graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in Spring 2022 with double majors in Political Science and Economics and a minor in Creative Writing. Ms. Deliwala has gained policy research experience through internships at numerous organizations, including the DC Congressional Office of Representative Pramila Jayapal, the Brookings Institution, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She been heavily involved in the Philly-based grassroots organization #VoteThatJawn, working as a Teaching Assistant (for the Academically Based Community Service Course “Writing and Politics,”) a Youth Leader, and a student reporter to get 18-year-olds registered to vote and first-time voters to the polls for the 2018 midterms and 2020 general election. Ms. Deliwala has held various positions in political science and economic research, a Spring 2021 Fellow for Penn’s Program on Public Opinion Research & Election Studies (PORES), a Summer 2021 Fox Fellowship at Brookings, and serving as a research assistant for multiple Penn faculty. She was also awarded the 2019 Terry B. Heled Travel & Research Grant to document the lives of an Adivasi community in her family’s hometown in India as well as the 2020-2021 U.S. Department of Education’s Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship. Ms. Deliwala is interested in studying rural economic development in South Asia.

Under the Fulbright-Nehru Student Research program, Ms. Deliwala is carrying out the project in the Narmada district of Gujarat, which is heavily populated by Adivasis, primarily the Gujarati-speaking Tavdi and Vasava tribes. This project will ultimately provide a critical case study of how Adivasis in India have been economically impacted by gaining land rights and offer insights into a path of sustainable development for the community.