By: Steve Ress
The second contingent of WARI scholars are beginning to arrive at the Nebraska Water Center and Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute.
WARI, short for Water Advanced Research and Innovation Fellowship program, is a partnership between NWC, DWFI, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), the government of India’s Department of Science and Technology, and the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum to help Indian students and scientists gain access to world class research facilities at UNL, promote cooperative research in many water science and engineering arenas, and help pave the way for the next generation of scientists and technologists from India to work with their peers in the U.S. The program’s primary goal is to foster long-term research and development connections.
WARI program coordinator Jesse Starita at DWFI said that of this second contingent of scholars, the first to arrive has been intern Jahangeer Ali, who arrived at UNL on April 1. He will be working primarily with Yusong Li in UNL’s Department of Civil Engineering.
“We anticipate the next intern will arrive on May 1 and then there will be a scattershot of arrivals through late June,” Starita said.
“This year there are a total of 11 WARI scholars. Of the original group of WARI interns and scholars that came to us last year, Rajesh Singh is the only one who has not yet returned to India. He will be with us until July,” Starita said. Singh is still active with research fieldwork under the guidance of Water Science Laboratory director Dan Snow and UNL Biological Sciences professor Karrie Weber. In April, Singh co-authored a poster on some of this work that was presented at DWFI’s Global Conference at Nebraska Innovation Campus.
The full slate of expected WARI fellows and interns for the coming year at UNL include the following:
Fellows
Paromita Chakraborty, Ph.D., assistant professor, SRM University, Chennai
Richa Kothari, Ph.D., assistant professor, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow
Shaik Rehana, Ph.D., assistant professor, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad
Rajendran Selvakumar, Ph.D., associate professor, PSG Institute of Advanced Studies, Coimbatore
Riddhi Singh, Ph.D., assistant professor, Indian Institute of Technology – Hyderabad
Interns
Ram Chavan, Ph.D. student, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Goa
Omkar Damodar Gaonkar, Ph.D. student, Indian Institute of Technology – Madras
Jahangeer Ali, Ph.D. student, Indian Institute of Technology – Roorkee
Anurag Kumar, Ph.D. student, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata
Ashish Kumar, Ph.D. student, Indian Institute of Technology – Bombay
Swati Suman, Ph.D. student, Banaras Hindu University