2 Indian American Future Leaders Aadi Kulkarni and Swati Ravi Among 12 George J. Mitchell Scholars

Two Indian Americans — Aadi Kulkarni and Swati Ravi — 12 members of the George J. Mitchell Scholar Class of 2023, the US-Ireland Alliance announced last month. One of the country’s most prestigious scholarship programs, it sends future American leaders to the island of Ireland for a year of graduate study. This year’s scholars were chosen from 351 applications.

Aadi Kulkarni of Far Hills, New Jersey, is a senior at Cornell University, studying Policy Analysis & Management. He is the co-founder and CEO of Polici.org, a startup that uses machine learning techniques to summarize peer-reviewed academic research papers to an eighth-grade reading level and disseminates those summaries to traditionally underserved populations. 

Kulkarni served as the President of the Cornell International Affairs Review and founded Cornell’s Office of Student Government Relations. He was also a research assistant on an NSF-funded project with researchers at Cornell, Microsoft Research, and UC Berkeley, assisting in automating data collection and designing methods related to ethics in technical college departments. 

He was an intern for Senator Cory Booker; for the House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce; and was a Campaign Fellow for Biden for President serving as an aide to the National Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Director. As a research associate for Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab, he helped build legal technology by integrating 50 state codes to H20, an open casebook platform, in Python, Java and HTML. 

He will study Social Data Analytics at University College Dublin.

Swati Ravi, a resident of Plano, Texas, is a senior at Columbia University studying Astrophysics. She will study Space, Science and Technology at University College Dublin. As a Science Research Fellow at Columbia, Ravi participated in computational astrophysics research, working to model distant galaxies with high-resolution near-field stars. She developed an astronaut tool to help detect hazardous portions of handrails on the International Space Station, in collaboration with NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory.

She won first place for her paper about that project at the 2021 AIAA SciTech Forum, the world’s largest conference for aerospace research and development. She also won the NASA Student Payload Opportunity with Citizen Science competition and led a team of 25 students in designing a project to study the effects of microgravity on antibiotic resistance of bacteria. 

Additionally, Ravi served as president of the Columbia Space Initiative, an aerospace engineering student club, and also oversaw Columbia University’s math and science tutoring outreach program with three New York City public schools. She teaches weekly math lessons to a group of 20 first through third-grade students in an after-school program targeted at low-income students in Harlem. 

She is the recipient of an international award, organized by Aviation Week Network, that recognizes the top 20 most promising aerospace students in their twenties.