K. VijayRaghavan and four desi scientists join prestigious academy.
By The American Bazaar Staff.
WASHINGTON, DC: The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) – one of the foremost institutions in America dedicated to the advancement of science, engineering, and math – has elected four new members of Indian origin as part of its latest round of additions.
India’s K. VijayRaghavan, along with Indian Americans Shiv Grewal, Vamsi K. Mootha, and Subir Sachdev, were all elected by member of the NAS last month, “in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.” The four were among 84 new members and 21 foreign associates that were elected from 15 countries around the world.
VijayRaghavan is currently the distinguished professor and director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore. He is also the Secretary of the Department of Biotechnology for the Indian Government, and has also been awarded the Padma Shri.
He is a graduate of IIT Kanpur, where he earned his B.Tech in Chemical Engineering. He then did post-graduate work in Molecular Biology, and earned a Ph.D. in that field from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. In the mid 1980s, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech).
Grewal is a laboratory chief and NIH Distinguished Investigator at the Center for Cancer Research (CCR), which is a subsidiary of the National Cancer Institute, itself only a part of the massive National Institutes of Health (NIH) in southern Maryland. According to his staff page, he is also the head of the chromosome biology section at CCR.
Originally from India, he attended the University of Cambridge under the prestigious Cambridge-Nehru scholarship, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1992. He then came to the US, joining the National Cancer Institute shortly after completing his time at Cambridge, and has been with the Institute ever since.
His research interests lie in the domain of “epigenetic control of higher-order chromatin assembly.” In other words, how specific enzymes within the body regulate the formation of chromosomes and other genetic material.
Mootha is a professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, a professor of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, and an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in southern Maryland. He holds a B.S. from Stanford University and earned his M.D. from Harvard Medical School.
According to his staff page at Mootha Laboratories, Mootha’s research interests like in “[elucidating] the network properties of mitochondria, and how these properties go awry in human disease.” His work has applications in the treatment of Type II diabetes, and other common diseases.
He has been feted with the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Judson Daland Prize of the American Philosophical Society, and the Keilin Medal of the Biochemical Society, among other awards.
Last but not least, Sachdev is a professor of Physics at Harvard University, with his specialty lying in condensed matter. He is a graduate of IIT Delhi, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Harvard, where he obtained his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics. In addition to his professorship at Harvard, he is a visiting professor at several universities across the US.
He has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books, articles, papers, and video essays over the course of his career. He won the LeRoy Apker Award in 1982, was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow in 1989, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in 2003, and was awarded the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics Distinguished Research Chair in 2009.
NAS is a “private, non-profit society of distinguished scholars [that was] established by an Act of Congress, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863.” Is is dedicated to “providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology.” With its newest additions, it now consists of 2,214 active members, with 444 foreign associates, of which VijayRaghavan is now one.