Elite of the Academia: Four Indian American College Professors Among 198 Guggenheim Fellows

Four Indian American college professors are among this year’s Guggenheim Fellows chosen for their prior career achievement and exceptional promise, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced. They include Swarat Chaudhuri, Saurabh W. Jha, Tulasi Srinivas, and Bijal Pravin Trivedi. 

The 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows, including 198 distinguished individuals working across 53 disciplines were selected through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 3,500 applicants As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each Fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions, the foundation said. 

“At a time when intellectual life is under attack, the Guggenheim Fellowship celebrates a century of support for the lives and work of visionary scientists, scholars, writers, and artists,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “We believe that these creative thinkers can take on the challenges we all face today and guide our society towards a better and more hopeful future.”

Swarat Chaudhuri is a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. His lab has developed an AI agent called Copra that repeatedly asks a large language model (LLM) to predict the next step in a proof of a mathematical theorem. Through the fellowship, Chaudhuri will work on designing an AI agent that proposes new math problems and their solutions, and another one that evaluates the “interestingness” outputs of the first agent. Unlike his previous research, this project will emulate the curiosity-driven exploration that human mathematicians are known for. As such, it will be an important step, Chaudhuri said, toward “building AI systems that can co-author research papers with human mathematicians,” which would represent a major advance in the use of AI for mathematics.

Saurabh Jha is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. His main research focus is the observational study of Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia). He is interested in understanding the properties of these exploding white dwarf stars: their progenitor systems, how they explode, and using this knowledge to turn them into tools with which to survey the Universe. He joined the Rutgers astrophysics group in September 2007. Previously, he was a Panofsky Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a Miller Fellow in the University of California, Berkeley Department of Astronomy, and a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

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Tulasi Srinivas is a professor of Anthropology, Religion, and Transnational Studies at The Marlboro Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. She is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Indian Sociological Society. Her research focuses on comparative ethics and Hinduism. Her books explore themes such as wonder, beauty, and grace through ethnographic explorations, and her recent work considers climate justice and religious ecology in a post-colonial context through the story of water in her hometown of Bangalore. An award-winning teacher, she most recently won the 2015 Helaine and Stanley Miller award for teaching excellence at Emerson College. She completed her PhD in Religious Studies and Anthropology through the interdisciplinary University Professors Program at Boston University. She received an MA in Urban Studies from USC and a BA (Honors) in Architecture from Bangalore University. Before joining Emerson, she taught at Wheaton College and at the Berkley Center for Religion and Peace at Georgetown University. She is a recipient of a Women’s Studies in Religion Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, the Stanley and Priscilla Kochanek prize from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Luce- ACLS fellowship in Religion, Journalism and International Affairs, the KHK fellowship at the Ruhr Universitat-Bochum, as well as fellowships from the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, at the Berkley Center for Peace at Georgetown University, and the Center for Study of Religion (CURA) at Boston University. She is a decorated author and editor of six books and over 30 award-winning journal articles and book chapters. She is working on a manuscript on religion, climate change, and ecological degradation titled “The Runaway Goddess: Water and Women in a Millennial City for which she won the LUCE-ACLS Fellowship in Religion, Journalism, and International Affairs.”

Bijal P. Trivedi is an award-winning freelance journalist specializing in longform narrative features about biology, medicine, and health. She currently works as the senior science editor for National Geographic. She has just completed her first book, “Breath from Salt: A Deadly Genetic Disease, a New Era in Science, and the Patients and Families Who Changed Medicine Forever.” Her New Scientist story “Slimming for Slackers” won the 2006 Wistar Institute Science Journalism Award. “Life on Hold,” also written for New Scientist, won the 2005-2006 Michael E. DeBakey Journalism Award. “The Rembrandt Code,” published in Wired, was tagged “Outstanding story on any subject: Print” by the South Asian Journalists Association. Trivedi co-authored “A Guide To Your Genome,” which won the 2009 National Institutes of Health “Gold” Plain Language Award. Most recently, her feature “The Wipeout Gene” was selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing: 2012. She taught in New York University’s graduate Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program from 2007 to 2012. She is now based in Washington, DC.