A professor and undergraduate student in Vanderbilt University’s School of Engineering are both recipients of esteemed 2022-2023 Fulbright awards that allow scholars to teach and conduct research abroad. Ravindra Duddu is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and Kristi Maisha is a civil engineering major.
Duddu will use his Fulbright-Kalam Climate Fellowship to travel to the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. He will spend five months teaching and conducting research on how ice-rock avalanches are triggered and identify the vulnerabilities of Himalayan glaciers, of which the second largest in the world is in India. Duddu’s project is titled MIRACLES (Modeling Ice-Rock Avalanches using Computationally Efficient Schemes).
“The overarching goal is to expand and strengthen research collaborations between my research group at Vanderbilt University and the faculty and students of the Center of Excellence (CoE) at IITM,” says Duddu, who is the first Vanderbilt University engineering faculty member to receive a Fulbright in at least 20 years.
Maisha, who received her Fulbright under the student category, will work at the National University of Singapore where over 10 months she will continue research she has been doing at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on sustainable building technology and implementation.
“I love working with stakeholders to identify feasible and actionable solutions to reduce building energy consumption,” says Maisha, who once worked in a research group with Duddu when she was in high school. “I am excited to continue that theme through my research in Singapore, since Singapore has so many programs to improve sustainability and reduce the effects of climate change.”
Fulbright is the world’s largest and most diverse international educational exchange program. Fulbright Scholar Award alumni include 61 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 76 MacArthur Fellows, and thousands of leaders and world-renowned experts in academia and many other fields across the private, public, and non-profit sectors.
Contact: Lucas Johnson, 615-343-0137
lucas.l.johnson@vanderbilt.edu