Scholars 2022: Shraddha More, Sohini Dudhat, Suhaib Yatoo and Unnati Ghia
In part three of the series of posts introducing this year’s scholars, we have Shraddha More, Sohini Dudhat, Suhaib Yatoo and Unnati Ghia.
Shraddha will be pursuing an MA in Design at Goldsmith's, University of London, Sohini will be a PhD student in the department of Biological Sciences at University of St. Andrew's Scotland, Suhaib will be pursuing an MSc in Biodiversity and Evolution at Imperial College London and Unnati will be attending the University of Cambridge to study an LLM in Law.
Shraddha More
For as long as she can remember, Shraddha More has been drawing. It is one of the many skills she has tried to master over the years. Her undergraduate programme in fine art painting played a vital role in nurturing her art practice. It helped her greatly to hone her skills in traditional arts such as painting.
Although she has a background in fine art, design is what attracted her more. She believes design is a language where narrative skills, artistic craftsmanship and communication technology converge. She is interested in the social functionality of design and its collaborative aspects. With the help of the Design Expanded master’s programme at the Goldsmiths University of London, she will be able to create tools and methodologies to conduct critical and practical research. As a non-design specialist, she sees this as an opportunity to engage in broader and critical design practice and its overlap with other disciplines.
According to her, pursuing higher education is an act of freedom. It is not just an opportunity to acquire a mere degree, but to cultivate one's mind. She hopes it will enable her to explore and experiment in a new field of learning and knowledge production. She also hopes to adopt a teaching path as she enjoys exchanging knowledge and views it as an agency to educate and develop oneself.
Receiving a first-degree black belt in Taekwondo and being a state-level gold medallist have encouraged her to keep learning and take up new challenges. It led her to learn another Korean martial form called Hapkido. Training in Martial arts for more than thirteen years has helped her embody characteristics such as confidence, control, focus, discipline and respect. One of her most crucial learnings from martial arts is self-respect, the ability to value oneself as a person and to never underestimate oneself.
Sohini Dudhat
Sohini will be studying the factors that may influence marine mammal strandings along the Indian coastline for her PhD at University of St Andrew’s. She has previously worked on seagrasses and dugongs in Andaman and Nicobar Islands and later on coral reefs and associated fish fauna in Malvan, Maharashtra with Wildlife Institute of India.
Born in a family of nature lovers, Sohini was exposed to hiking and nature trails since a young age. This, along with regular visits to coastal regions of India and volunteering stints increased her curiosity about nature and marine life, and led her to choose a career path of studying marine biology. The marine realm is filled with unexplored wonders and the idea of living near the oceans and spending time observing marine animals for a living fascinated her. She developed a keen interest in marine ecology and conservation, and worked on shallow coastal ecosystems and marine mammals with Wildlife Institute of India for around five years. She now aspires to continue her work on marine mammal strandings for further research.
Besides research, Sohini is passionate about painting and often paints about marine life and landscapes. She believes art can be a good medium of bringing people closer to science, and that such awareness is required for conservation of marine life.
Suhaib Yatoo
From a young age Suhaib Yatoo has had an insatiable thirst for natural history. Unsatisfied with book learning, he spent hours addressing his questions directly to nature. He would explore the wilderness and keenly observe the complex life phenomena surrounding him. He believed that this brought him closer to the biological world, and added to his interest in biology, especially biodiversity. According to him, there are still several areas to discover in the fields of taxonomy and biodiversity.
His first area of study was fungi. So thorough was his study that one of the largest biodiversity forums in India, ‘eflora of India,’ recognized him as their fungus expert. The more he explored fungi, the wider the scope of his investigations grew, leading him into the world of insects. With the discovery of new species (the first one being a fungus gnat!), learning and documenting their complex life cycles, his primary focus shifted from fungi to insects. He had to battle with the literature owing to scanty data on the Indian species, prompting him to start documenting the biodiversity himself. To date, he has published six research articles in national and international journals, with many more to follow (under review).
He believes conservation comes after taxonomy and exploration, and no status can be assigned to a species until sufficient data is available. In the meantime, it is undeniable that taxonomy is dying, especially in the Indian sub-continent, and there are only a few mavens left. The data available is insufficient and has huge gaps that need to be filled. He hopes to fill these gaps by creating a separate database for Indian species and involving citizens to explore the biodiversity around them.
Unnati Ghia
Unnati Ghia is presently a counsel at the Bombay High Court, in the chambers of Dr. Abhinav Chandrachud. She is a graduate of the B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) programme at National Law School of India University, Bangalore, where she received the Gold Medals for Young Leader of the Year, Best Student Advocate and Best All-Round Graduating Girl Student. For the past two years, Unnati has practiced in criminal, constitutional and public interest litigation in India.
She is a former International Law Association Scholar, and has previously worked with Land Conflict Watch as a Legal Research Fellow, where she contributed to a comprehensive online database of land-based litigation and unlawful dispossession across all 29 States.
Unnati’s academic focus is on the gendered impact of ordinary civil and criminal laws, and she has authored several publications on the intersection between judicial interpretation, constitutional principles and gender stereotypes. With the generous support of the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, she will commence her graduate studies from the University of Cambridge this year. Her long-term goal is to use her acquired knowledge from Cambridge to teach, alongside a career in the courts, and initiate wider conversations on the gender inequalities in the law and in the legal profession.
When she is not burning the midnight oil as a lawyer, Unnati can be found taking long walks, being incommunicado on a trek, and eagerly awaiting the next Marvel movie.
