President Obama Honors Six NRIs for Extraordinary Early-Career Scientists and Engineers

The White House/Office of the Press Secretary
NRIpress.club/ February 18, 2016

President Obama today named six NRIs (non-resident Indians) researchers as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. The winners will receive their awards at a Washington, DC ceremony this spring.

“These early-career scientists are leading the way in our efforts to confront and understand challenges from climate change to our health and wellness,” President Obama said. “We congratulate these accomplished individuals and encourage them to continue to serve as an example of the incredible promise and ingenuity of the American people.

The Presidential Early Career Awards highlight the key role that the Administration places in encouraging and accelerating American innovation to grow our economy and tackle our greatest challenges. This year’s recipients are employed or funded by the following departments and agencies: Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of the Interior, Department of Veterans Affairs, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, and the Intelligence Community. These departments and agencies join together annually to nominate the most meritorious scientists and engineers whose early accomplishments show the greatest promise for assuring America’s preeminence in science and engineering and contributing to the awarding agencies’ missions.

The Newest Six NRI recipients are:

1. Rahul Mangharam, Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. His interests are in real-time scheduling algorithms for networked embedded systems with applications in energy-efficient buildings, automotive systems, medical devices and industrial wireless control networks.
   His group has won several awards in IPSN 2012, RTAS 2102, World Embedded Programming Competition 2010, Honeywell Industrial Wireless Award 2011, Google Zeitgeist Award 2011, Intel Innovators Award 2012, Intel Early Faculty Career Award 2012, NAE US Frontiers of Engineering 2012, Cornell Embedded Systems Cup 2012, Accenture Innovation Jockeys 2012, NSF CAREER Award 2013 and the IEEE Benjamin Franklin Key Award 2014. He also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences and is a founding member of the PRECISE Center. He directs the mLAB- Real-Time and Embedded Systems Lab at Penn.
   He received his Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University where he also received his MS and BS. In 2002, he was a member of technical staff in the Ultra-Wide Band Wireless Group at Intel Labs. He was an international scholar in the Wireless Systems Group at IMEC, Belgium in 2003. He has worked on ASIC chip design at FORE Systems (1999) and Gigabit Ethernet at Apple Computer Inc. (2000). He was the Stephen J. Angelo Term Chair Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania from 2008-2013.
2. Kiran Musunuru, MD, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University and Associate Physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His interest are to understand how naturally occurring human genetic variation protects (or predisposes) some people to cardiovascular and metabolic disease—the leading cause of death. He is also involve in using human pluripotent stem cells to create human-derived tissues, containing specific DNA variants, as genetic disease models in which environmental and epigenetic influences have been minimized.
   Dr. Musunuru received his M.D. degree from Weill Cornell Medical College, his Ph.D. degree from The Rockefeller University, and his M.P.H. degree from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He trained in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Cardiovascular Medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital, followed by postdoctoral work at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
3. Sachin Patel, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Psychiatry, Associate Professor, Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, Director, Division of Addiction Psychiatry, developed and manage a translational neuroscience research laboratory aimed at elucidating the neurobiological mechanisms of central stress responses relevant to stress- and trauma-related psychiatric disorders. He is specifically interested in the role of endogenous cannabinoids as mediators of stress resiliency and have extramurally funded research projects in areas of endocannabinoid synaptic biology, endocannabinoid-based therapeutics development, and investigation of circuit-level mechanisms by which endocannabinoids promote resiliency to stress. He is also interested in understanding how plant-derived cannabinoids, including tetrahydrocannabinol, regulate affective behavior and stress responses in light of the growing use of medical cannabis by patients with a verity of psychiatric disorders including PTSD, addiction, and depression.
   He graduated with a B.S. in Biological Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1998. In 2006, he graduated from a Medical Scientist Training Program at the Medical College of Wisconsin and then began his adult clinical psychiatry residency training at Vanderbilt University, which he completed in 2010
4. Vikram Shyam, Propulsion flow Dynamicist at NASA Glenn Research Center, is a member of the Turbomachinery and Heat Transfer Branch at NASA Glenn and a member of the graduate faculty at Cleveland State University. His research includes computational and experimental analysis of and concept development in unsteady engine flow physics, biomimetics, energy harvesting, active and passive flow control, flow visualization and water purification. He is currently participating in NASA’s Rocket University program. Vikram got PhD in Aerospace from The Ohio State University.Activities and Societies: Student Representative to Graduate Program Chairs Counsel. President, Sigma Gamma Tau – Aerospace Honors society. Founder of Micro Air Vehicle Team. Secretary of AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.) Member of University Core Curriculum committee. SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) Aero Design Team.
5. Milind Kulkarni. Ph.D. in Computer Science, an associate professor with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, is specialize in Programming Languages and Compilers, and his interests lie specifically in developing languages, compilers and runtimes that support efficient programming and high performance on emerging complex architectures.Kulkarni graduated in 2002 with a B.S. in both Computer Science and Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University. And also received Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University. After receiving my Ph.D., he joined the Institute for Computational Sciences and Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin as a postdoc, where he worked with the Intelligent Software Systems (ISS) group. Since the fall of 2009, he had been in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University.He was named Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2016. In 2015, he got Purdue College of Engineering Exceptional Early Career Teaching Award. He also received Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Teaching Award, 2014, Teaching for Tomorrow Fellow, 2014–2015, Purdue Seed for Success award, 2013, DOE Early Career Research Program award, 2013. Wilfred “Duke” Hesselberth Award for Teaching Excellence, 2012 and NSF CAREER award, 2012.
6. Shwetak Patel, a nationally recognized expert in sensor systems research who directs the UW’s UbiComp Lab and focuses on sensing systems, energy and water sensing, mobile health and developing new interaction technologies, was also nominated by the National Science Foundation. He was cited for “inventing low-cost, easy-to-deploy sensor systems that leverage existing infrastructures to enable users to track household energy consumption and make the buildings we live in more responsive to our needs.”
   Dr. Patel was a founder of Zensi, Inc., a residential energy monitoring company, which was acquired by Belkin, Inc in 2010. He is also a co-founder of a low-power wireless sensor platform company called SNUPI Technologies and a consumer home sensing product called WallyHome. WallyHome was acquired by Sears in 2015. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008 and B.S. in Computer Science in 2003. Dr. Patel is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2011), Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2011), Sloan Fellowship (2012), TR-35 Award (2009), World Economic Forum Young Global Scientist Award (2013), and an NSF Career Award (2013). He was also was named top innovator of the year by Seattle Business Magazine, was named Newsmaker of the year by Seattle Business Journal in 2011. His past work was also honored by the New York Times as a top technology of the year in 2005.
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   The awards, established by President Clinton in 1996, are coordinated by the Office of Science and Technology Policy within the Executive Office of the President. Awardees are selected for their pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and their commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education, or community outreach.