Applications Open Now

PI: Andrew Ollett, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations 

Partner Organization: Somaiya Vidyavihar University, Bombay

Proposal: This proposed second year of the Bōlī project will build upon the foundation laid last year and establish the frame for a larger program to collect and present online lexical data and grammars for endangered, tribal, and minor languages of South Asia. During the second year, this project will bring together fourteen people for a two-day seminar at the Social Science Baha in Kathmandu, Nepal. Following the seminar, project leaders will present the larger program of work and the results of the Bōlī project to date at a public event at the Center in Delhi. Project leadership will include: a) Professor G. N. Devy, an Indian cultural activist, literary critic, former professor of English, and creator of the fifty-volume People's Linguistic Survey of India; b) Professor Andrew Ollett, academically engaged with South Asian texts, textual corpora, and digital scholarship; c) Professor Salikoko Mufwene, a scholar with research interests in evolutionary linguistics and language vitality; d) Charles Cooney, a technical consultant and developer at the University's ARTFL Project; and e) James Nye, retired Bibliographer for Southern Asia and director of the Digital South Asia Library (DSAL) and the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia. At the conclusion of the project, DSAL will publish lexical data and grammars for at least ten languages of South Asia as open online resources.

PI: Jason Grunebaum, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations

Partner Organizations: BRAC University, Kathmandu University

Proposal: "Translating Bangladesh and Nepal, Reading the World" will consist of two four-day summits led by the South Asian Literature in Translation (SALT) Project, based at UChicago. The first will be in partnership with BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the second in partnership with Kathmandu University (KU), Nepal. Both summits will bring together accomplished literary translators and students of literary translation, as well as providing a forum for publishers from the western Anglosphere to engage with their Bangladeshi and Nepali counterparts—with the goal of making Bangladeshi and Nepali literature in translation more visible outside South Asia, and to continue training the next generation of literary translators from both countries.

PI: Ronit Ghosh, Department of Music

Partner Organizations: Ahmedabad University

Proposal: "AI-sthetics" tracks the prehistory and anticipated futures of (commercial) Artificial Intelligence (AI) in music and sound cultures in India. The project comprises an exploratory trip identifying stakeholders, infrastructure, and networks of production and distribution around AI in music in two Indian cities (Ahmedabad, Delhi), two public events at the National Institute of Design (Ahmedabad) and the UChicago Delhi Center, and a permanent online exhibition and digital repository at the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS), UChicago. Music offers a site where the creative and cultural potential and commercial career of AI comes into full view. The broader drift of this project is to investigate the history of "sound work" in India in an era where tradition, genre, and style is crafted and engineered in DIY home studios, virtual orchestras, and AI-powered tools.

PI: Lisa Moore, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice

Partner Organizations: Miranda House

Proposals: There is a long history of collaboration amongst Indian scholars and many scholars who study Black culture and life in the United States. In that spirit, this project seeks to work with the UChicago New Delhi Center to spend a year exploring a potential collaboration with Miranda House and potentially another institution to develop a series of shared conversations between the Black women work course at the Crown Family School of Social Work, addressing relationships to labor in the context of institutions, communities, and families. During this year of development, opportunities will be created to shape virtual and in-person conversations between collaborators, which will be used to design a collaborative, cross-national project to capture the oral histories of women in ongoing dialogue regarding their experience with work in multiple contexts.

PI: Aniruddha Hazra, Department of Medicine

Partner Organizations: Solidarity and Action Against The HIV Infection in India (SAATHII)

Proposal: Transgender people in India often face major challenges when seeking gender-affirming medical and surgical care, such as hormone therapy and surgeries that align their bodies with their gender identity. Although India has progressive laws recognizing transgender rights and requiring public hospitals to provide these services, many people still encounter stigma, outdated medical practices, and limited access, especially outside major cities. This project builds directly on prior work funded by the University of Chicago Provost's Global Faculty Award in 2022, which examined how to improve medical education and clinician training in the care of transgender and gender-diverse people in India. The proposed study extends this work by examining how these educational gaps translate into real-world clinical practices and patient experiences with gender-affirming care. We will document the experiences of transgender individuals and healthcare providers in three states: Tamil Nadu (a leader in transgender health services), Odisha (an emerging system), and Manipur (a region with limited services). The findings will be translated into practical tools, including policy briefs for government officials, training materials for healthcare providers, and easy-to-understand educational resources for transgender communities.

PI: Samir Mayekar, Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Partner Organizations: Indian Institutes of Technology and affiliated innovation hubs, SINE at IIT Bombay

Proposal: The University of Chicago's Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation proposes an India Deep Tech engagement to strengthen UChicago's long-term collaboration with IIT institutions and expand pathways for translating and commercializing deep tech research emerging from leading Indian innovation ecosystems. In Spring 2026, Polsky will deliver a 10-week pilot program in partnership with IIT partners and SINE at IIT Bombay, aligned with Bharat Innovates, a Government of India initiative funded by the Ministry of Education. The PGFA award period (July 1, 2026, to June 30, 2027) will support continued institutional engagement following the pilot, including outcomes tracking, post-program advising for participating startups, and structured partnership development with IIT and ecosystem stakeholders.

PI: Andrew Ferguson, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering / Department of Chemistry

Partner Organizations: IIT Kanpur

Proposal: The proposed award will support an Indo-US bilateral scientific workshop, Recent Advances in Modelling Rare Events 2027 (RARE2027). The RARE2027 workshop will engage the important scientific challenge of modeling rare events in molecular simulation as a grand challenge in the field of molecular modeling, with critical applications for human health, process engineering, and clean energy. RARE2027 will represent the next iteration in a series of highly successful prior Indo-US bilateral workshops—RARE2014, RARE2017, RARE2021, and RARE2025—that have advanced the frontier of the field, articulated roadmaps for innovation and advances, and initiated numerous scientific collaborations between US and Indian researchers. The workshop will be co-hosted by organizers at UChicago and IIT Kanpur.

PI: Ariel Kalil, Harris School of Public Policy

Partner Organizations: Aawaaz Education Services

Proposal: India has a once-in-a-generation opportunity, because of its young population, to boost economic productivity. But early childhood deficits threaten to squander that opportunity by producing a workforce that cannot reach its full productive potential. A large share of children in early grades lack foundational skills in literacy and math. To leverage parents' untapped input in early childhood skill-building, we propose Chat2Learn, an intervention that promotes parent-child conversational learning engagement. In partnership with Aawaaz Education Services, a leading Indian education research organization, we propose an academic lecture and planning meeting to be held at the University of Chicago Delhi Center with stakeholders, followed by a 6-month pilot study of Chat2Learn in urban schools across North India.

PI: Satish Chitneni, Department of Radiology

Partner Organizations: National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, Sri Aurobindo Institute of Radiopharmaceutical Sciences

Proposal: This initiative aims to explore and understand the status of radiopharmaceutical and radiotheranostics research in India and launch new collaborations centered on molecular imaging and radiotheranostics research. A series of meetings and visits to public and private institutions that have a medical cyclotron and/or complementary expertise to establish radiopharmaceutical research and training programs are planned. In the second phase, in collaboration with researchers from two partnering institutions, we aim to initiate specific projects focused on novel radiopharmaceutical development for molecular imaging with positron emission tomography (PET) or radiotheranostics development. Finally, a scholarly workshop will be conducted at the UChicago Delhi Center to disseminate knowledge and promote discussions on new radiopharmaceuticals and radiotheranostics to improve diagnosis and treatment of various diseases, especially cancers.

PI: Mohit Manohar, Department of Art History

Partner Organizations: Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune (IISER Pune)

Proposal: The travel conference "Deccan Cities Through Time" inaugurates an interdisciplinary study of Deccan India across a broad time period. The Deccan comprises most of peninsular India and its cities, landscapes, and natural worlds remain critical for understanding South Asian history and culture. The current travel conference invites discussions of how issues of urbanism in the Deccan changed over time, how urbanization was linked to the local environment, and how urban changes were reflected in the cultural domain, such as in music, literature, and the visual arts. Invited participants will travel to a select number of cities in the Deccan to see, firsthand, what distinct moments of urbanism in the Deccan entailed. The participants will then reconvene at the University of Chicago Delhi Center for a two-day research conference open to colleagues and students in India.

PI: Giulia Galli, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering

Partner Organizations: Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (IIT Kharagpur)

Proposal: This project will establish a strong collaboration between UChicago and IIT Kharagpur by exploring light matter interaction from first principles in devices built around localized defects in solids. The focus will be on computational spectroscopy, coherence properties, and energy transfer processes. These processes are central to the design of materials and devices for quantum information applications such as quantum memories and networks, as well as for classical optical devices. We will organize workshops, seminars, and mutual visits and set up joint theory-driven material and device design efforts to exchange scientific ideas and methodologies, thus accelerating the development of quantum photonic devices through collaborative research.

PI: Philip Bohlman, Department of Music

Partner Organizations: Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata, Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology, Gurgaon, India, Bhawanipur Education Society College (BESC), Kolkata, Goethe Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata

Proposal: Bengal's borderlands are not only lines on a map but lived spatial practices—routes of pilgrimage and labor, sites of worship and cultural memory, and stages where music makes place while borders render life precarious. This project convenes a Kolkata-based symposium, curatorial block seminar, and doctoral workshop, co-developed with the Birla Academy of Art and Culture (primary partner) and collaborating partners BESC and Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, with support from the UChicago Centre in Delhi and the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), in Gurgaon, India. A central outcome will be a modular traveling exhibition prototype of objects, recordings, and documentation, to premiere in Kolkata and then travel to the UChicago Centre in Delhi for a public-facing installation and conversation.

PI: Supratik Guha, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering

Partner Organizations: Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation, Government of India, The Panchayati Raj and Drinking Water Department, Government of Odisha

Proposal: This proposal seeks a second-year extension for the project "Automated Chlorine Sensing Network for Rural Water Safety: An IoT and AI-Based Approach." Our team successfully designed, developed, and performed initial testing of a low-cost IoT mote and firmware for in-line water quality monitoring. Following testing, we plan to assemble and deploy a sensor network of 10–12 IoT motes in 5–6 selected villages in South India. We will concurrently develop machine learning models to monitor water quality, predict chlorine replenish cycles and maintenance schedules, and correct for sensor signal drifts. Through this long-term pilot, if the outcome is positive, the results will help us seek additional funding for establishing nationwide geographical scale-out of such sensor networks.

PI: Anindita Basu, Department of Medicine

Partner Organizations: All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi

Proposal: Incidence of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)—a chronic autoimmune disease of the intestines—is on the rise worldwide. Our goal is to establish an advanced experimental and analytical framework that can examine the genetic and epigenetic differences between epithelial progenitor cells in non-IBD individuals in the US and India, using intestinal organoids under different environmental stimulation. We will then apply the same framework to examine genetic and epigenetic susceptibility of the intestinal epithelia to immune dysfunction and inflammation in patients with IBD. This work will help strengthen the partnership between UChicago and AIIMS, New Delhi, the top medical research university and hospital in India, allowing both institutions to benefit from complementary expertise, and establish a bi-national foundation in cutting-edge IBD research.

PI: Andrew Higginbotham, Department of Physics

Partner Organizations: Indian Institute of Science (IISc)

Proposal: What can be learned by combining quantum computing technology with exotic new materials? Superconductors carry electrical current without resistance and are central to modern quantum computers. This proposal focuses on a much less understood system: a thin bilayer made of nickel and bismuth (Ni/Bi). Remarkably, when layered together they become superconducting at relatively high temperatures, and experiments suggest that this superconductivity may be unconventional, potentially involving exotic quantum states. The goal of this project is to integrate Ni/Bi bilayers into superconducting microwave circuits, the same type of technology used in quantum computers. Beyond advancing fundamental knowledge, the project builds an international collaboration between researchers in the U.S. and India, strengthening ties between materials science and quantum technology.

PI: Maanasa Raghavan, Department of Human Genetics

Partner Organizations: Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences (BSIP)

Proposal: India harbors one of the most genetically diverse populations globally, shaped by deep population splits and longstanding genetic admixture with East and West Eurasia. This project will generate whole-genome sequencing data from existing, in-house collections to address geographic gaps in coverage. We will perform low-coverage genome-wide screening of 100 ancient individuals, primarily from Kashmir and Indus Valley-associated contexts. In parallel, we will prepare DNA sequencing libraries for 100 saliva samples from a well-characterized modern cohort. Integrated analyses of ancient and modern genomes will enable preliminary tests of population structure, admixture models, and regional continuity, and will catalyze the next phase of grants and publications on the population history of India.