Manjushree Hegde
Manjushree Hegde holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Master’s in Sanskrit. Apart from the University education, she has studied Vyākaraṇa traditionally under the renowned scholar, Mahāmahopādhyāyā Dr. Pushpa Dixit, and Vedānta under Sri Ashwathnarayana Avadhani in Mattur. A fellow at Infinity Foundation India, she has been interested in traditional wisdom and knowledge systems of India and has been participating in the Swadeshi Indology movement. She has presented numerous papers on prestigious platforms and recently, a monograph titled “Reclaiming Rāmāyaṇa” penned by her has been published as the third volume of the Proceedings of Swadeshi Indology Conferences. She teaches Vyākaraṇa and Vedānta in her spare time and currently serves as Assistant Professor at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore.
Dr. Jayaraman Mahadevan
Dr. Jayaraman Mahadevan is currently serving as Director, Research Department, Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram, Chennai, Scientific Industrial Research Organisation. He has a PhD in Sanskrit from the Department of Sanskrit, University of Madras, His thesis was titled The Doctrine of Tantrayukti – A Study. He has presented 20 papers in various National and International conferences and has given talks in Universities, Colleges and Institutions of National Eminence. He has also written books, organised seminars, funded projects and been the guide for students pursuing their PhD. His areas of interest are Yoga, Tantrayukti, Vedanta, Sanskrit Poetic Literature and Manuscript Studies.
Dr. Sowmya Krishnapur
Dr. Sowmya Krishnapur has completed her PhD in the area of Sanskrit Grammar under the guidance of Dr. P Narasimhan, from the Department of Sanskrit, University of Madras. She was a UGC Junior and Senior Research fellow. After acquiring an M.S. in Biochemistry from Central College Bengaluru, she has gone on to obtain Acharya Vyakarana (M.A.) degree from the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, Sringeri. She has worked as Senior Computational Linguist and Subject Matter Expert at Vyoma Linguistic Labs Foundation Bengaluru, for the production of several multimedia resources for Sanskrit learning. She is currently the head of e-learning at the company, in charge of the online Sanskrit learning portal, http://www.sanskritfromhome.in. She has presented and published several research papers, notably one on Vyakarana at the 16th World Sanskrit Conference in Bangkok in 2015.
Prof. K Gopinath
Prof. Gopinath is currently employed as Professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore in the Computer Science and Automation Department. He has a doctorate from Stanford, Master’s from UW Madison, BTech from IITM and has worked at AMD and Sun Microsystems Labs.
T. N. Sudarshan
T. N. (Therani Nadathur) Sudarshan considers himself to be an eclectic amalgamation of dharmic modernity. With a traditional upbringing in a practising SriVaishnava household and hailing from a Acharya lineage in the Visistadvaita Sampradaya, he is schooled in the western methods and techniques of Sciences and Engineering, and is a Computer Scientist by profession, engaging primarily in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and related technologies. He also performs the role of a Pancaratra Agama archaka (priest) at his native village whenever he is able to visit it. He is also currently pursuing studies (Sri Bhashya and other SriVaishnava granthas) in a traditional setting with sampradaya gurus. He is widely read and deeply conversant with the Western Dialectic, its epistemology, academic mechanisms of delivery and dissemination and the abrasive civilizational encounters between the Indian (Dharmic) and the “rest”.
His research and practical interests in the extant civilizational encounter have been to formalise and enable the reification of the dharmic dialectic and its related semantics (both epistemologically and ontologically) not only in the socio-cultural space but also in pedagogy, both in the Sciences and Social Sciences. As a published scholar in the Swadeshi Indology Conference Series, and also having performed at world-class levels in engineering and leadership for more than a decade in building technology and engaging with the real world (across the globe), this unique experience (methods and techniques from various areas of expertise) is brought to pragmatically bear upon the formulation and enabling of the Dharmic narrative both in academic, real-world and pedagogical settings.
Manogna Sastry
Manogna Sastry is a Master of Science from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, with a strong background in theoretical physics and mathematics including General Relativity, Inflationary Theory, Quantum Field Theory and Astrophysics. She has held the Young Science Fellowship in 2008 from the Indian Institute of Science; she currently serves as the Chief Operations Officer and Research Associate at Centre for Fundamental Research and Creative Education, Bengaluru. Her research interests encompass the study of ancient India as well as seeking to understand the manifestation of the old spirit of the land through contemporary forms of philosophy, science and literature. Philosophy of Mind is another domain that fascinates her, with its connections to neuroscience and consciousness studies. Manogna is a passionate environmentalist, involved with the solid waste management issues of Bengaluru as well as a keen gardener.
Megh Kalyanasundaram
Megh Kalyanasundaram is an Indian citizen with close to nine years of lived experience in China. He is an alumnus of DAV Gopalapuram, University of Madras and ISB (Indian School of Business) where his study has included quantitative and qualitative research methods as part of his post-graduate specialization in Strategy, Marketing, Leadership. His professional experience includes stints as Market Leader in the China-entity of a Fortune 40 technology firm and as Head of Business Development, Sales and Marketing of an Indian talent development multinational. He also has served a term on the Board of a non-profit (Shanghai Indian Association) as General Secretary Sponsorship and Music. His research interests broadly revolve around ancient India in global and transnational history narratives with focus on some aspects of ancient Indian chronology. Other professional pursuits have included building differentiated digital platform of Indic texts targeted at specific learning and research needs, singing and composing, compering and event planning.
Dr. Ram Manohar
Dr. P. Ram Manohar is the Research Director at Amrita Centre for Advanced Research in Ayurveda. He received BAMS degree from Bharathiyar University, Coimbatore, in 1991 and MD (Ay) degree from Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences, Bengaluru, in 2001. He has been contributing in the field of Ayurvedic research since the last 24 years. He has to his credit more than 60 publications with research papers published in SCI research journals as well as contributions in other journals and chapters for books.
Dr. Manohar was honored with the Ayurveda Marga Pravarthaka Award by the L. Mahadevan’s Ayurveda Foundation in 2014 and Vaidya Sundarlal Joshi Smriti Sodha Puraskara by the Mahagujarat Medical Society in 2015. In 2016, Poonthottam Ayurvedashram bestowed the Bharadvaja Puraskaram Award to him for contributions to research in Ayurveda. He has made research visits to United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Argentina, Germany, France, Netherlands, Italy, Austria, Latvia, Russia, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, Thailand and Sri Lanka for the promotion of Ayurveda.
Dr. Kundan Singh
Kundan Singh, is a faculty at Sofia University, Palo Alto and Vice President of the Cultural Integration Fellowship, San Francisco. He has authored a book titled The Evolution of Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo, Sri Ramakrishna, and Swami Vivekananda and several book chapters in edited works such as “Beyond Mind: The Future of Psychology as Science,” “Beyond Postmodernism: Towards a Future Psychology,” “Relativism, Self-Referentiality, and Beyond Mind,” “Relativism and its Relevance for Psychology,” and “Beyond Postmodernism: Towards a Future Psychology.” He has lectured extensively in San Francisco Bay Area and has made several paper presentations at conferences in the United States and India. Some of the recent ones are “Colonialism and the Aryan Invasion/Migration Theory,” “Sri Aurobindo’s Invalidation of the Aryan Invasion Theory and the Contemporary Western Archeological Evidence,” “Decolonizing the Indian Mind for the Study of Dharma,” and “Addressing Postcolonial Studies from the Perspective of Integral Studies.” In the last couple of years, he has also taken two five-day workshops in a university in India titled “Philosophy of Science and Indian Cosmology” and “Decolonizing the Indian Mind for India’s Revival as Envisioned by Sri Aurobindo.