Three
Indian American academics were elected among its 84 new members were
recognized for their distinguished and continuing achievements in
original research: Jagdish N. Bhagwati, Columbia University, New York
City; Sabeeha Merchant, University of California, Los Angeles; and Subra
Suresh, National Science Foundation, Arlington.
Membership
in the National Academy of Science is one of the highest honors given
to a scientist in the United States. Among its most renowned members
have been Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Thomas Edison, Orville
Wright and Alexander Graham Bell.
Bhagwati
is a Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on
Foreign Relations. He has been Economic Policy Adviser to Arthur
Dunkel, director general of GATT; Special Adviser to the UN on
globalization; and external Adviser to the WTO. He has served on the
Expert Group appointed by the Director General of the WTO on the Future
of the WTO and the Advisory Committee to Secretary General Kofi Annan
on the NEPAD process in Africa. Five volumes of his scientific writings
and two of his public policy essays have been published by MIT press.
Bhagwati's latest book "In Defense of Globalization" was published by
Oxford University Press in 2004 to worldwide acclaim.
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Merchant was the
lead author on a three-year, 115-scientist research project reporting a
"gold mine" of data on a tiny green alga called Chlamydomonas, with
implications for human diseases. She was honored with a major award
from the National Academy of Sciences in 2006, the Gilbert Morgan Smith
Medal, awarded only once every three years, for her exceptional
scientific research. She has been awarded research grants from the
National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S.
Department of Agriculture and the Air Force Office of Science Research.
Suresh was nominated
by President Barack Obama and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate
as director of the National Science Foundation in September 2010. As
director of this $7-billion independent federal agency since October
2010, he leads the only government science agency charged with
advancing all fields of fundamental science and engineering research
and related education. Prior to assuming his current role, Suresh
served as the Dean of the School of Engineering at MIT.
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