Keynote Speaker · 2026 Graduation

Dr. Rita D. Sherma, PhD

Past HSCI Karma Yoga Honoree, 2021

Dr Rita Sherma is a pioneer whose determined, decades-long effort has established Sanātana Dharma studies with genuine academic rigor across the American higher-education landscape.

Rita D. Sherma, PhD, is the Founding Director of the Center for Dharma Studies at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), Berkeley, where she is a core member of the doctoral faculty. She previously held the Swami Vivekananda Visiting Professorship at the University of Southern California, and in 2024, GTU named her its Distinguished Faculty Lecturer. Her scholarship spans Hindu philosophy, theology, ethics, and dharma & sustainability. She has published nine books and supervised twenty doctoral students in Hindu Studies. Her 2026 book is A Hindu Ecological Liberation Theology, and she is compiling a volume on Hindu Philosophy and Ethics for the Oxford University Press, releasing in 2027.

🏵️ Karma Yoga Honoree

Dr. Abhijit Dam

A hospice pioneer whose two decades of work in rural India have brought dignified end-of-life care to communities where the practice had never existed before. With his work, he has returned Vedantic wisdom to its natural place at the bedside of the dying.

Dr. Dam has led palliative care in the Jharkhand-West Bengal region since 2005. He founded Kosish, a rural hospice to give the poor a dignified death — a saṅkalpa (determination) born from years of watching patients die alone in urban critical-care units. Kosish has trained eleven cohorts of Palliative Nursing Aides drawn from village women. His study of Vedanta, the Upanishads, Buddhism, and quantum physics led him to found Farishtey & the International Death Doula Foundation, where he created the first culturally-appropriate death-doula course grounded in Vedantic teaching and the Buddhist practice of phowa. His book, Does the Moon Exist?, contributes to a growing scholarship on afterlife, consciousness, and dying well.

🏵️ Karma Yoga Honoree

Payal Sawhney, LCSW

A seva-hero whose two decades of clinical practice and community-building have created a lifeline for South Asian immigrants across Southern California — trauma-informed, culturally grounded, and offered pro bono to those the mainstream system too often misses.

Payal Sawhney is the founder and Executive Director of Saahas for Cause, a nonprofit serving South Asian immigrants across three Southern California counties. Saahas provides pro-bono trauma-informed therapy to survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing, alongside programs for older adults, women, youth, community health, public-benefits access, hate-crime prevention, and citizenship preparation. She holds an MSW from the University of Pune and an MHA from the University of Cincinnati, with clinical licensure in both Ohio (LISW-S) and California (LCSW). Her published research addresses bariatric-care outcomes, adolescent adverse-event reporting, and the acculturation of South Asian immigrant women in the United States.