Pakistani Arshi Saleem Hashmi also among the 16 fellows.
AB Wire
NEW YORK: Indian journalist Rahul Pandita and Zeena Johar, founder and CEO of SughaVazhvu Healthcare, based in Tamil Nadu, are among the 2015 Yale World Fellows selected this year.
Yale World Fellows is Yale University’s signature global leadership development initiative and a core element of Yale’s ongoing commitment to internationalization. Each year, the University invites a group of exemplary mid-career professionals from a wide range of fields and countries for an intensive four-month period of academic enrichment and leadership training.
The 16 selectees this year bring the total number of Yale World Fellows since the program’s start in 2002 to 273 Fellows, representing 84 countries.
“I am delighted to welcome this incredible group of activists, artists, policy makers and key global players to Yale,” said incoming Yale World Fellows Director Emma Sky, in a statement. “The Fellowship was designed to provide people like these – working tirelessly toward large scale change – a valuable opportunity to take a step back from the intensity of their work, to learn from and exchange with the University community, and to develop strong relationships with like-minded peers.”
2015 marks the 14th cohort of Yale World Fellows, and also sees the program joining the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale, which aims to inspire and prepare Yale students for global leadership and service.
“I’ve interacted with World Fellows regularly over the years and know the kind of creativity, energy, vision and experience they infuse into the University experience,” said Sky. “They are wonderful sources of inspiration and mentors for our undergraduate and graduate students.”
Arshi Saleem Hashmi, an Assistant Professor at the National Defense University (NDU) in Islamabad, Pakistan, is also among the 16 awardees this year.
Zeena Johar is founder & CEO of SughaVazhvu Healthcare (SVHC) and IKP Centre for Technologies in Public Health (ICTPH) – organizations working to create a primary-care delivery network through rural clinics. The clinics rely on affordable healthcare technologies and highly trained Indian medical practitioners to provide basic healthcare services for hard-to-reach rural populations of India.
SVHC’s innovative care delivery model has enabled over 70,000 patient visits through its network of nine clinics in rural Tamil Nadu. She returned to India in 2007 after earning her PhD in Molecular Diagnostics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Johar spearheaded ICTPH’s academic alliance with University of Pennsylvania’s School of Nursing – this partnership helped develop India’s first certificate program for Indian medical practitioners, empowering them to practice evidence-based protocol driven primary-care medicine. SVHC was awarded the NASSCOM Social Innovation Honor 2014, and is a part of the International Partnership for Innovative Healthcare Delivery Network (founded by McKinsey & Company, World Economic Forum and Duke University). SVHC is also a part of the Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke University.
She is a member of Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) National Council on Public Health, and the Governing Board at Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology (IBAB), Bangalore. She has published in numerous journals and is currently pursuing Program for Leadership Development at the Harvard Business School (HBS), Boston. She was an Ashoka Fellow in 2013, Aspen Global Leadership Network Fellow 2014 and one of Asia’s 100 Pioneers by Purpose Economy in 2014.
Rahul Pandita is a journalist and an author based in New Delhi. Until recently, he was the Opinion and Special Stories editor of The Hindu, one of India’s leading English-language newspapers. He has reported extensively from various theaters of war, including Iraq and Sri Lanka.
In India, Pandita is mostly known for his reportage on Maoist insurgency in central and eastern India, and on the turmoil in Kashmir in northern India. He is the author of three bestselling books: “Our Moon Has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir”, “Hello, Bastar: The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement” and “The Absent State: Insurgency as an Excuse for Misgovernance” [co-authored].
He is the recipient of the International Red Cross Award for conflict reporting and has been a speaker at international forums like the Carnegie Endowment Center, Stanford University, Brown University, State University of New York, Michigan University, and the World Affairs Council.
In Fall 2014, he was a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). He belongs to the minority Hindu community of Kashmir called Kashmiri Pandits who were forced into exile in 1990 in an act of ethnic cleansing. Through his work and advocacy of truth and reconciliation, he is aiming at bringing to justice the perpetrators of crimes against the Pandit community, and also at bridging the chasm between the Pandits and the majority Muslim community in his homeland.
Arshi Saleem Hashmi specializes in religion and violent conflicts. She is an Assistant Professor at the National Defense University (NDU), Islamabad. She has studied at the American University (AU) & at SAIS, John Hopkins University.
She is working on a book focusing on Religious Seminaries in India and Pakistan & Politics of Jihad. She gives lectures at Armed Forces Staff Colleges, Defense Services Intelligence Academy & Intelligence Bureau Pakistan. Hashmi has worked with the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Middle East Institute in USA. She has been a Kodikara fellow that resulted in the book “Conflict Transformation from Ethnic Movement to Terrorist Movement,” published by the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, Colombo in 2008. She is a member of Women without Borders (WwB) Vienna and its project Sisters Against Violent Extremism (SAVE). She has been a speaker at TedxWomen 2012 in New York and Omega Women Conference in New York in 2012. In 2014, she was selected as Rotary International Peace Fellow at Chulalongkorn University-Bangkok and studied the conflict Resolution process in Mindanao, Philippines and South Thailand. She is widely published and often appears as a political analyst on Pakistani television.