look news india
New Delhi, August 27 (HS). Zehra Mahdi, an alumnus of the Faculty of Architecture and Acoustics, Jamia Millia Islamia, has been awarded the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowship by the United States-India Educational Foundation for the period from September 1, 2024 to May 31, 2025. During the fellowship period, she will do her research work at Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, USA.
Zehra holds a Bachelor's degree in Architecture from the Faculty of Architecture and Acoustics, Jamia Millia Islamia. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture and Regional Planning, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, West Bengal. Prior to this, she also completed a Master's degree in City Planning from IIT Kharagpur, West Bengal.
She is currently a Senior Research Fellow at IIT and her doctoral research focuses on neighbourhood change in informal settlements, which are predominantly Muslim and influenced by the presence of neighbourhood institutions. Zehra uses visual geography, including oral research traditions, to examine internal diversity and particularly through the built environment and captures residents' perceptions and experiences.
During her stay at Rutgers, she will examine the dynamics of infrastructure provision, informal institutions, and legitimacy in informal settlements.
It is significant that Zehra Mahdi is one of the 24 Indian researchers selected for the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship this year, who will represent a variety of disciplines in the US.
She is the eldest daughter of Ghizal Mahdi and Razia Zaidi and sister of Zainab and Aman Mahdi. Her family belongs to Nahtaur, a town in Bijnor district of Uttar Pradesh.