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Los Angeles, January 12, 2017
NRIpress.club/Meena Sharma/Gary Singh Grewal
When President Barack Obama announced the names of the researchers who have been awarded the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) this week, four NRIs- Pankaj Lal, Associate professor, Agriculture, Montclair State University, Kaushik Chowdhury Professor Electrical Northeastern University,
Manish Arora, Associate professor,| Environmental Medicine & Public Health and
Aradhna Tripati, Associate Professor, geologist, UCLA were on the list.
“I congratulate these outstanding scientists and engineers on their impactful work,” Obama said in a statement announcing the awards. “These innovators are working to help keep the United States on the cutting edge, showing that federal investments in science lead to advancements that expand our knowledge of the world around us and contribute to our economy.”
 Pankaj Lal, Associate Professor at Montclair State University
Pankaj Lal, specialize in Environmental Economics and Policy/Energy Geography/ Climate Change/ Economic Modeling and Impact Analysis, Associate Professor at Montclair State University ( Department of Agriculture) will receive the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) -- the highest honour given by the US government to science and engineering professionals.
Pankaj Lal got his Ph.D., Natural/Forest Resource Economics, 2011/ Food and Resource Economics (minor), University of Florida, M.B.A., Forestry Management, 2004, Indian Institute of Forest Management, India, M.A., Geography, 2001, Delhi School of Economics, India and B.A.(H), Economics, 1999/ Delhi University, India.
Dr. Lal is an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Studies and associate director PSEG Institute for Sustainability Studies, Montclair State University. His ongoing research projects involve aspects of renewable energy, water, natural resources, and economies that collectively impact communities around the world. He has published more than three dozen scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals, federal research agencies technical reports and book chapters. He is thesis committee chair of nine graduate students and committee member for another five students.
As Associate Director, he is in-charge of grants, funding and research. He integrates research activities of faculty into a broader and more meaningful framework with multiple outcomes. Along with his research team, he has been working in the United States, Caribbean islands, Africa and South Asia focusing on environmental economics and economic geography, human dimensions of ecosystem management, natural resource conservation and policy, and climate change.
He has received nearly $8.61 million in grants and contracts for his research as PI or co-PI, including funding from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Wildlife Conservation Society, NJ Department of Environmental Protection, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and others.
Recently he has been awarded prestigious NSF CAREER Award to explored place based opportunities for bioenergy sustainability. He was economic analysis lead in NJ Governor’s Office of Recovery and Rebuilding grant whereby ecosystem inventory for natural resources was developed and ecosystem tradeoffs due to potential engineering design solutions for flood mitigation across the state was evaluated.
He worked with Winrock International India as program officer in natural resource management division and Pricewater house Coopers India in the government reforms and infrastructure development practice. He has reviewed competitive grant proposals for agencies like National Science Foundation, United States Department of Agriculture, Sea Grant Consortium, and serves as manuscript reviewer for diverse array of environmental journals.
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 Kaushik Roy Chowdhury, Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University
Kaushik Roy Chowdhury, winner of the NSF CAREER award, is Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University and Faculty Fellow of the College of Engineering.
Kaushik Chowdhury got his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2009, and M.S. from the University of Cincinnati in 2006
In 2016, he got Naval Research Director of Research Early Career Award and was also the winner of the NSF CAREER award in 2015. He is the recipient of best paper awards at the IEEE Intl. Conference on Communications (ICC) in 2013, 2012 and 2009 and Intl. Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC) in 2013.
Kaushik Chowdhury is the Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Simulation and is Sr. Member of the IEEE. He serves as the area editor for the journals: Elsevier Ad Hoc Networks, Elsevier Computer Communications, and EAI Transactions on Wireless Spectrum.
His research is mainly focused on Spectrum sensing, spectrum sharing, interference avoidance, and policy issues for dynamic spectrum access in licensed and mmWave bands. Coexistence in TV white spaces and LTE/WiFi. Learning and inference. Radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting. Link and network layer design with energy-aware duty cycling. Use of wireless energy transfer. Energy provisioning and resource management. Channel modeling for glavanic coupled communication. On-body and intra-body communication.
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 Manish Arora, B.D.S., M.P.H., Ph.D., Associate professor of Environmental Medicine & Public Health,
Manish Arora, B.D.S., M.P.H., Ph.D., Associate professor of Environmental Medicine & Public Health, Director of Exposure Biology at the Senator Frank Lautenberg Environmental Health Sciences Laboratory in the Department of Preventive Medicine. Dr. Arora is an environmental epidemiologist and exposure biologist. Arora’s research focuses on effects of prenatal and early childhood chemical exposures on life-long health trajectories.
He got his Ph.D. from the University of Sydney in 2006, and undertook postgraduate fellowship training at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Manish Arora, is known for his work on biomarkers that utilize human deciduous and permanent teeth to reconstruct the timing of exposure to various harmful chemicals and essential nutrients. His methods are being applied to the study of outcomes that are national health priorities, including autism and children’s neurodevelopment. Dr. Arora has also undertaken research on the intersection of oral and systemic health with the environment. His work supports shared genetic risk factors between periodontal disease and various cancers (pancreatic, colorectal, and prostate cancers). He has also reported increased risk of periodontal disease and dental caries in those exposed to environmental metal toxicants.
Manish Arora, presented the Keystone Science Lecture Seminar Series talk at NIEHS. Hosted by William Suk, Ph.D., director of the NIEHS Superfund Research Program (SRP), Arora discussed his research on “Uncovering Early Life Exposure to Chemical Mixtures Using Micro-spatial Analysis of Teeth.”
“A good way to think of this research is to consider teeth as an encrypted hard drive,” said Arora. “We are trying to break down that encryption and look at different layers of information on each tooth. Some layers give us information on environmental pollutants, others on diet. And I believe there are many more layers of information to uncover.”
Understanding critical developmental windows
Although studies are making progress in better understanding the timing of exposures, Arora pointed out the difficulty of using prospective studies to link exposures to outcomes.
“For an outcome that affects one in 100, you would need about 10,000 mother-child pairs to get a sample size of close to 100 in a prospective study. One way to avoid this is to match cases to controls and look retrospectively, but then we have to reconstruct exposures leading up to the health outcome,” said Arora. “Using maternal biological markers doesn’t always accurately reflect fetal exposure, since different chemicals cross the placenta at different levels. This is where teeth come in.”
eeth start developing prenatally and carry an imprint of daily circadian rhythm, the body’s internal clock. During development of a tooth, rings are formed, much like the rings of a tree. Arora’s research team has developed methodology that combines detailed analysis of the layers of teeth that correspond to specific life stages. They can use this information to reconstruct exposure to individual chemicals and chemical mixtures, as well as cumulative exposure, in the second and third trimesters of prenatal development and early childhood.
Samples for these early-life exposure studies can be collected non-invasively, because most children lose their baby teeth between the ages of 6 and 13.
Linking innovative research to NIEHS priorities
Arora is particularly interested in exploring how we respond to environmental mixtures, an NIEHS priority described in a 2013 Environmental Health Perspectives editorial.
In his work using children’s teeth to map early-life exposure in cohorts in Mexico and the U.S., Arora is working to better understand how chemical mixtures affect children differently. Looking at more than 10 chemicals across 50 developmental time points per individual, Arora’s research team is revealing potential critical windows of susceptibility to chemical mixtures.
They are also investigating how disruptive conditions, such as stress, can change the way chemical exposures affect the body, and working toward understanding the pathways involved in disruption of normal body functions as a result of chemical, physical, and psychological stressors.
“In the past, the field of environmental health has focused on measuring exposures and linking that to an outcome, but that approach misses information about how different people respond to different exposures,” said Arora. “We are looking at toxicant interactions more closely, by examining the disruptions of different pathways after exposure, based on chemical signatures in teeth.”
Arora touched on some of his recent innovative findings related to chemical distributions in teeth, such as a May 2013 study published in the journal Nature.
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 Aradhna E. Tripati, Associate Professor, geologist, Department of Earth and Space Sciences,
Aradhna E. Tripati, Associate Professor, geologist, Department of Earth and Space Sciences, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, California, (2010-present).
Aradhna’s research Areas are-Geology and Tectonics, Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry, Geobiology, Impact of ocean acidification on marine invertebrates (pteropods, mollusks, coral, sea urchins) and Changing coastal environments.
She got her Ph.D in Earth Sciences from University of California, Santa Cruz in 2002 and B.Sc. Geology, California State University, Los Angeles in 1996.
She was involved in Joint appointments-Earth & Space Sciences Department, Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences/ Department, Institute of Geophysics & Planetary Physics/ Visiting scientist, California Institute of Technology (2007-present)/ Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences; Host: John Eiler
Research Fellow, University of Cambridge (2002-2009),Department of Earth Sciences; Hosts: Harry Elderfield and Mike Bickle, Field expedition Leader, Svalbard (2008), Cauvery Basin (2008) Sedimentologist, Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 199 (2001) and Undergraduate Research Fellow, Los Alamos National Laboratory (1995)
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