Funded by our generous anonymous donor, seven undergraduate students will travel to India to carry out research. Read about this year's Fellows here!

 

Magdalene Kuznia

School of Nursing


This summer Magdalene will spend five weeks in New Delhi making medical resources more accessible to HIV/AIDS patients. She will be working through the Salokaya College of Nursing in order to research how nursing students and staff make educational and preventative resources available. Once that is established, she wants to increase outreach efforts towards the population that receives the least amount of educational and preventative resources for HIV/AIDS. 

 

Dustin Hartz

Physics major

 

Dustin will be traveling to Southern India, spending most of his time at an ashram there which specializes in the teachings of Advaita Vedanta and Sanskrit. Here, he will explore connections between Vedantic philosophy and scientific interpretations of consciousness, a phenomenon which science is currently insufficient in fully explaining or verifying the physicality of. The goal of this particular project is to further the development of scientific progress in this area by researching what kinds of questions need to be asked, and what types of experiments might increase our understanding of the unknown.

 

Courtney Green

Arabic and Middle Eastern major

 

Courtney Green will be working with an NGO called Kolkata Sanved that effectively applies dance techniques to help rehabilitate women and children who are suffering from an abusive past. This technique called "Sampurnata" meaning "completeness" is meant to both empower the victims and provide creative options for their future. She is interested in understanding how dance can be used to positively impact the lives of disadvantaged women as well as the community around them.

 

Akeram Suleiman

Mechanical Engineering

 

Akeram will carry out a research project at the Center for Integrated Rural Development (CIRD) located in Udaipur. Her goal is to increase the amount of research available to help reduce electricity shortage in the rural areas of Rajasthan. Also, she will collaborate with local technicians and co-design a device that generates electricity. The materials used to construct this device would be locally available and that would reduce cost. The end result of this research will be a working electricity generator and the establishment of a workshop to teach the mechanisms of this particular device through initiatives offered by CIRD.

 

Bailey Binke

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology major

 

Bailey will be working in Bangalore with the Indian Institute of Science doing research concerning elephant-human interactions. Her goal is to study the effects of damage done by elephant herds to buildings and crop fields in the villages surrounding wildlife reserves,. In addition, she will, along with a PhD student, work on aspects of elephant life, elephant-human conflict, and work with people in the villages affected by elephant presence. With this data, Bailey hopes to uncover methods and mechanisms to minimize human-elephant contact that does not harm either party, while preserving wild elephants and their neighboring settlements.

 

Saarah Anjum

Neuroscience and Medical Anthropology

 

Saarah will travel to Narayana Hrudayalaya in Bengaluru, one of India's biggest multi-specialty hospital chains that uses large economies of scale to bargain down the cost of supplies and care. The hospital is able to offer holistic healthcare at a fraction of what it costs across the globe, while remaining a world-renowned institution for care that is both profitable and growing business. She hopes to study the methods this institution employs to make healthcare more accessible and affordable while via interviews and observational study. She also hopes that her research, which will focus on cancer patients, will reveal the impact this healthcare system has on the poor and also provide facts about what makes a hospital more efficient.

 

David Buruchara

Double major in Economics and Sociology

 

This research will be based around the work of SammaaN Foundation (SF), a non-profit social enterprise that aims to re-structure the Indian Rickshaw sector in the Indian state of Bihar. The project will be centralized around the entrepreneurial conditions and opportunities of rickshaw pullers in Bihar. He will carry out interviews and surveys that will seek to find out how SF’s activities have provided entrepreneurial means and opportunities for rickshaw pullers to elevate themselves and their communities socioeconomically. He will collect data on socioeconomic components and the overall socioeconomic satisfaction of rickshaw pullers under the SF program.