Alumni receive Fulbright-Nehru fellowships

In April 2022, two Tufts computer science alumni will be traveling to India to do research. Supriya Sanjay, A19, and Jared Lieberman, A18, both received a Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Fellowship, among 11 Tufts students and alumni to benefit from a Fulbright Scholarship this academic year. In fact, Tufts was a top producer of Fulbright U.S. students in 2021-2022.

Sanjay’s research project centers on disinformation in India’s 2019 general elections. Her interest in the topic was piqued during the U.S. elections in 2016. Sanjay says that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his conservative Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) “continued to hold power during the 2019 general elections in India. I’m interested to see how exactly BJP and the opposition party’s candidates used social media in their campaigns and what role, if any, they believe social media plays in democracy.”

Sanjay says her time at Tufts has prepared her for this journey to India. Her education gave her the practical skills to do research and also instilled a sense of curiosity and duty. “This grant will allow me to pursue a research question that I am uniquely equipped to answer, and that I have an obligation to do so, especially if the findings might build stronger democracies in the future,” she says.

Since graduating from Tufts in 2019, Sanjay has been employed at Amazon Robotics as a Software Development Engineer II, where she worked on a large scale machine learning system. 

Jared Lieberman’s research in India will take a different slant. The goal of his research is “to utilize data science techniques to understand how differences in state-level politicians in India impact the provisioning of public services… specifically explor[ing] how incumbency affects policies regarding financial inclusion, infrastructure, and health outcomes.”

Lieberman’s interests in studying public service delivery in India started while at Tufts through his experiences in research and applied settings. He was fascinated by the role of incumbency as it “operates as a disadvantage for state-level candidates in India.” His research project in India will also reflect his interests in machine learning, computational methods, and data-informed policy. He says his Tufts education has equipped him with “the ability to recognize the interdisciplinary nature of seemingly one-dimensional topics.”

Lieberman is currently employed as a data scientist with the Massachusetts state government within the Department of Revenue. He was previously employed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a software developer.

The Department of Computer Science congratulates Supriya Sanjay and Jared Lieberman on their Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Fellowships!