The theories of communication may sound drab when you first think of it, but chat with Dr Usha Raman and you’ll know just how important its applications are in the real world. An associate professor at the University of Hyderabad’s Department of Communications, Dr Usha has secured a place in this year’s Fulbright Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship. For this, she will be travelling to Boston, Massachusetts, to research and teach at MIT’s Comparative Me-dia Studies Programme for about four months.
With communications, health and new media technology as her focus, Dr Usha’s research work will encompass them all. “Say someone’s planning to develop a mental health app. The kind of research I would do would be about how people actually help in understanding mental health, and what role such a role would play in feeding the understanding or making use of it,” she says.
Previously working as a health communicator with the L.V. Prasad Eye Institute, Dr Usha has also written as a technology and health journalist. “I’ve always had a twin ambition — for a while I wanted to be a doctor, but I didn’t make it into medical school. After my BSc (at Nizam’s college) I applied for an MSc and for a Bachelor Of Communication Journalism in Osmania University. I got into both, but I realised that if you wanted to be a world class scientist you needed to pretty much give up on everything else — you’d have to marry science. I’ve always been writing since I was a child so I stuck to journalism.”
Dr Usha will also be teaching at MIT through a course of six seminars: “The seminars will broadly look at the interface between media, health and globalisation — lifestyle clinics, the new trends in IVF, fertility clinics, and what role the media plays in promoting these new technologies and what people think about them.”
