Staff Profiles
Yoga Prasetyo is a member of the Migration and Mobilities cluster at ARI. His research interest lies in how illicitness is constituted and contested through urban infrastructure under Southeast Asia’s temporary migration regimes.
Dr Fathun Karib is a joint appointment postdoctoral fellow under the ARI-DIJ Research Partnership on Asian Infrastructures and affiliated to the Inter-Asia Engagements and Science, Technology, and Society clusters at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. His current research interests are energy and environmental history, critical agrarian studies, Anthropocene/Capitalocene, political economy of disaster, commodity frontiers, and the history of geology as a science.
Dr Dhiraj Kumar Mohan Nainani completed his LLB and LLM at the London School of Economics and Political Science before earning his doctorate in law at the University of Hong Kong. As a legal geographer, his current research focuses on examining and reframing the relationship between the law and the Asian city. He is also interested in the spatio-legality of (bio)surveillance and disease.
Dr Myra Mentari Abubakar commenced her NUS Fellowship with the Asian Urbanisms Cluster with effect from 9 December 2024. She completed her PhD in 2024 at The Australian National University. At ARI, Dr Myra will explore the complex dynamics of memory and heritage in urban settings. She seeks to shed fresh light on cultural and historical framework by tracing how sites of hero legacy and gendered narratives shape public spaces and collective memory within urban landscapes.
Dr Jonathan Galka commenced his appointment as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Science, Technology and Society (STS) Research Cluster with effect from 15 April 2025. Dr Galka has a PhD and MA in History of Science from Harvard University. At ARI, he will begin a project on the histories and futures of deep seawater technologies, especially ocean thermal energy conversion.
Dr Sumit Mandal graduated with a PhD in History from Columbia University in 1994. He is a transregional historian who researches the outcome of longstanding inter-cultural and inter-religious interaction in the Malay World — understood as a flexible and expansive cultural geography. His current research explores keramat (Muslim shrines) in the Indian Ocean as the built archives of a little-known past enmeshed in individual acts of intellectual and political leadership, inter-cultural interaction, transregional connections, piety, and miracles. This research has taken him to Java, Sumatra, Singapore, the Malay Peninsula, and Cape Peninsula (South Africa).
Dr Erica M. Larson is Research Fellow in the Religion and Globalisation Cluster. She has a PhD in Anthropology from Boston University. Dr Larson’s current research focuses on Indonesian students seeking higher education in Singapore as a “digital diaspora”, examining the way in which social media usage is intertwined with academic aspirations, religious practice, and various forms of mobility. She is also launching a collaborative, multi-sited project researching Indonesian youth active in religious organisations.
Dr Céline Coderey received her M.A and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Provence, Aix-Marseille 1 (France) and her M.A. in Psychology from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). She also holds a Diploma in Burmese Language from the National Institute of Oriental Language and Civilization in Paris.