L to R: Pooja Chaudhary, Ambassador Eric Garcetti and Mahindra Rautela

On Wednesday, June 21, Pooja Chaudhary and Mahindra Rautela, two visiting scholars in Purdue’s Indian Overseas Visiting Doctoral Fellows program, were invited to Washington, D.C. to take part in an intimate meeting with Prime Minister Modi, First Lady Jill Biden, U.S. Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti, Minister of External Affairs Dr. S. Jaishankar, Indian Ambassador to the United States Taranjit Singh Sandhu, CEO of Micron Technology Sanjay Mehrotra, and Director of the National Science Foundation Dr. Sethuraman Panchanathan.

The fellows were among a selective group of 11 U.S. and Indian students invited to participate in a discussion on “Skilling for the Future,” which included showcasing US-India collaboration in STEM.   

OVDF is a Purdue program funded by India’s Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), which aims to provide meaningful international research experiences for top PhD students enrolled in Indian institutions while fostering collaborations between research groups in order to strengthen institutional partnerships between Purdue and Indian higher education institutions. Chaudhary and Rautela are among 74 fellows, since 2020, who have spent more than a year at Purdue doing research with Purdue faculty. Chaudhary is a student from Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Mohali, working with Purdue Professor Alexander Laskin in the Department of Chemistry and home advisor Baerbel Sinha on a project investigating the environmental impact of brown carbon over the Indo-Gangetic plain. Rautela, a student from Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, has been working under the guidance of Purdue Professor Shirley Dyke and Indian IISC advisor (and Purdue alumnus) Dr. S. Gopalakrishnan, exploring intelligent deep space habitats.