The Mittal Institute’s Highlights of 2023

Robert Rahman Raman joins the Mittal Institute as the third batch of India Fellows. We spoke with Robert about his research.
India Fellow Rinan Shah speaks about looking forward to her upcoming year with the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University, at the Delhi office.
Chase Van Amburg ‘24, an Integrative Biology concentrator who is also earning a concurrent Master’s degree in Applied Math, specializes in data science with a focus on climate change. This summer he received a grant from the Mittal Institute to begin work on “Mapping Heat in Microenvironments,” and he gave us a glimpse into the essence of his project.
The Mittal Institute welcomed two new Visiting Artist Fellows, Cop Shiva and Garima Gupta, to campus for the start of their eight-week research fellowship at Harvard. The program allows mid-career visual artists from around South Asia to spend eight weeks on the Harvard campus. The VAF differs from a typical artist residency program in that it is research-centered, providing artists with the vast resources of Harvard’s intellectual community to enhance their artistic practice.
Cop and Garima share more about their artistic motivations below. And save the date to join them at the Mittal Institute’s Visiting Artist Fellows Art Exhibition on Tuesday, October 10, where they will share more of their work with our community.
On Friday, March 24, President Ranil Wickremesinghe joined the Harvard community live from Sri Lanka for a discussion moderated by professors Tarun Khanna, Harvard Business School, and Asim Khwaja, Harvard Kennedy School. The event, co-sponsored by the Center for International Development at Harvard and the Mittal Institute, covered a wide range of topics, from the recently announced IMF deal to social, economic, and political reforms to human rights issues and the way forward for the country.
This past fall, Harvard University welcomed Prof. Martha Selby as the Sangam Professor of South Asian Studies. She joined us from the University of Texas at Austin, where she taught since 1999. A scholar of South Asian literature, she shared more about her work and previewed her upcoming April 6 talk on “Sangam Tamil Lecture – Loss in Love and War: On Grief and Longing in Old Tamil Poetry.”