Nine Indians in elite US science academy

For the first time nine Indian scientists and engineers have been selected to the elite US National Academy of Sciences and Engineering thus putting an impression of the presence of Indian immigrants in American education and industry.

The academy includes 2000 members of whom there are just more than 30 Indians. The annual list used to include one or two Indians every second or third year but this time there has been an astonishing result. The list includes a number of US based Indian scientists including Caltech astrophysicist Shrinivas Kulkarni and Dr Praveen Chaudhury, who was recently appointed to head the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Also elected to the National Academy of Engineering are Debasis Mitra, vice president of the Mathematical Sciences Research at Bell Labs (for contributions to the modeling, analysis, and design of communication networks), Vinod Sahney, senior vice president of the Henry Ford Health System (for improving health care systems), Anjan Bose, dean, College of Engineering and Architecture, Washington State University (for contributions to tools, education and research on power systems) and Sanjit Mitra, professor, department of electrical and computer engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara (for contributions to signal and image processing, for research supervision, and for writing pioneering textbooks).

Apart from the six US based Indians selected, three Indians have been selected in academics which include Dr. R. A Mashelkar, Director General, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in New Delhi (for contributions in engineering and exceptional leadership and management of the Indian National Laboratories); Bindu Lohani, secretary of the Asian Development Bank in Manila, and Obaid Siddiqi, professor, and director, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, Bangalore.