Six Indian-Americans among the 2022 Guggenheim Fellows.

The New York-based John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has outed its list of Guggenheim Fellowship recipients, and several of them are Indian-origin.

The foundation has selected a diverse group of 180 ‘exceptional individuals’ from a pool of 2,500 submissions, based on their ‘prior achievement and exceptional promise’. Among them are six talents of Indian origin:

1. Prashant K Jain: Chemistry
   Professor of Chemistry, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Originally from Bombay, Jain graduated from Institute of Chemical Technology, and went on to study at Georgia Tech, and later moved to Harvard as the first postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Adam E. Cohen. He is now the director of a research lab on nanoscale light-matter interactions at UIUC.
2. Shrikanth Narayanan: Computer Science
   University Professor and Nikias Chair in Engineering, University of Southern California, Narayanan is a Bachelor of Engineering from the College of Engineering Guindy, Chennai. Narayanan’s research and inventions using AI-based conversational assistance focused on mental health care delivery, treatment, and quality assurance.  He holds 18 patents.
3. Manjul Bhargava: Mathematics
   Professor of Mathematics, Princeton University since 2003. His research focuses on number theory, the study of whole numbers and their relationship to each other, is the recipient of the 2014 Fields Medal which is considered the Nobel in Mathematics, Fermat Prize in 2011 and the 2005 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize.
4. Suparna Rajaram: Psychology
   Distinguished Professor in Cognitive Science, Stony Brook University, SUNY. A graduate of Mount Carmel College, Bengaluru, with a Master’s degree from Bangalore University, and a national merit Scholar of India. She completed her post-doctoral work in Cognitive Neuroscience at Temple University School of Medicine. She’s been at Stony Brook since 1993, and her lab researches on human learning and memory with a focus on social aspects of memory. Suparna is the founder of Women in Cognitive Science, an international group.
5. Jyoti Puri: Sociology
   Hazel Dick Leonard Chair and Profesor of Sociology, Simmons University in Boston. She writes and teaches sexuality studies, death studies, and postcolonial feminist theory. Her recent book, ‘Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle against the Antisodomy Law in India’s Present’, was published by Duke University Press in 2016. It received the Distinguished Book Award from the Sociology of Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association in 2018. She was a Research Associate at the Women’s Studies Program in Religion at Harvard Divinity School in 2019-2020.
6. Manisha Sinha: United States History
   Draper Chair in American History, University of Connecticut. Manisha is a leading authority on the history of slavery and abolition and the Civil War and Reconstruction. Born in India, she received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She is the author of award-winning books and has received numerous fellowships, including one from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and two from the Mellon Foundation.

Guggenheim Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, since its inception. The fellows include over 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors, a press release from the Foundation clarified. This is the 97th class of the prestigious Fellowships.