INDIAN AMERICAN PHYSICIAN GIVES $3 MILLION TO OHIO'S SOUTHWEST GENERAL HOSPITAL
Southwest General Hospital, a 358-bed acute-care facility in Middlebury Heights, Ohio, has received a $3 million gift from one of its physicians, Vasu Pandrangi, and his wife, Lisa, for a $128 million hospital expansion project.
The campaign is the largest privately funded project underway in Cuyahoga County and the largest gift in the hospital's history. The expansion will include a new patient bed tower with 96 private patient rooms, which will be named Pandrangi Tower, in recognition of the Pandrangi family's gift. The project includes a new emergency room, a critical-care unit and an underground parking garage.
A plastic surgeon and chairman of the Southwest Community Health System board of trustees since 2007; Pandrangi is a former chair and a current member of Southwest General's medical staff. His wife is a registered nurse and has been involved in the Westlake School District. The family lives in Westlake, Ohio.
"For more than 32 years, Southwest General has been home to Lisa and me," said Pandrangi in a statement. "Our choice to make this donation was truly embedded in the fact that we want to see Southwest General's future flourish," the Indian American physician added.
"Southwest General has been a staple in the communities southwest of Cleveland since 1920. We hope that by giving back to this community hospital, others will do so as well."
Pandrangi has also donated funds to buy air conditioning units, stretchers and wheelchairs for King George Hospital's burn unit in India. The ER/critical care unit and the patient bed tower are expected to open in early 2014 and yearend 2014, respectively.
TWO INDIAN AMERICANS NAMED 2013 JEFFERSION SCIENCE FELLOWS
Kannappan Palaniappan from University of Missouri and BL Ramakrishna from Arizona State University are among the 2013-2014 Jefferson Science Fellows who begin their one-year assignments in mid-August. Initiative of the Office of the Science and Technology Adviser to the US Secretary of State, the Jefferson Science Fellows Program is designed to further build capacity for science, technology and engineering expertise within the US Department of State and US Agency for International Development.
Palaniappan directs the Center for Computational Imaging and VisAnalysis focusing on research at the synergistic intersection of image analysis, computer vision, parallel computing, information fusion and machine learning. Co-inventor of the Interactive Image SpreadSheet for interactive exploration of massive multispectral imagery, he is a recipient of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Scholarship, University of Missouri William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowships, Boeing Welliver Summer Faculty Fellowship and the NASA Public Service Medal.
Ramakrishna's research is expected to lead to an understanding of the engineering design principles adopted by a variety of living systems such as fungi and microbes, and could have applications in the areas of biosensors and silicon-bio hybrid devices. A PhD from the IIT Madras in 1982, he is dedicated to preparing engineers with cross-disciplinary knowledge, entrepreneurial spirit, global perspective and a sense of mission needed to lead the world to meet the great challenges facing humankind in the 21st century.
Those selected as Jefferson Science Fellows are chosen not only for expertise and leadership in their fields, but for interest in global issues, policy-making and promoting relations across cultures.
FOUR INDIAN AMERICANS WIN 2013 SIMONS INVESTIGATORS AWARD
Kannan Soundararajan of Stanford, Rajeev Alur from Univ of Pennsylvania, Salil P. Vadhan of Harvard and Senthil Todadri from MIT were among the 13 mathematicians, theoretical physicists and theoretical computer scientists who have won 2013 Simons Investigators awards. They will each receive $100,000 a year for five years for their long-term research with the possibility of renewal for five additional years. The awards are given by New York-based Simons Foundation to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences.
Mathematician Soundararajan's work is focused on understanding the zeros and value distribution of L-functions, and on analyzing the behavior of multiplicative functions. The India-born professor has an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and a PhD from Princeton.
Two of three awards in computer science went to Alur and Vadhan. Alur is a top researcher in formal modeling and algorithmic analysis of computer systems. He has BS and PhD degrees in computer science from IIT-Kanpur and Stanford University, respectively.
Vadhan has produced a series of original and influential papers on computational complexity and cryptography. He has a PhD in applied mathematics from MIT, a certificate of advanced study in mathematics from Churchill College at Cambridge University and AB in mathematics and computer science from Harvard University.
A professor of physics, Todadri's work with Fisher on Z2 topological order in models of spin liquid states has provided key insights and initiated the systematic investigation of gauge structures in many-body systems, now a vital subfield of condensed matter physics. Todadri has his Ph.D. from Yale and an undergraduate degree from IIT-Kanpur.
OBAMA NOMINATES INDIAN-AMERICAN TO KEY JUDITIART POST
Legal luminary Vince Girdhari Chhabria has been nominated by US President Barack Obama to a key judiciary post in California. Chhabria, nominated to be US District Judge for the Northern District of California, is currently Deputy City Attorney for Government Litigation and as the Co-Chief of Appellate Litigation at the San Francisco City Attorney's Office, where he has worked since 2005.
"These men and women have had distinguished legal careers and I am honored to ask them to continue their work as judges on the federal bench," Obama said, adding that they will serve the American people with integrity and an unwavering commitment to justice. Once confirmed, Chhabria will be the first South Asian Article III judge in California.
Chhabria began his legal career by clerking for Judge Charles R Breyer of the US District Court for the Northern District of California. A member of the South Asian Bar Association of Northern California and NASABA, he was a speaker at the 2011 NASABA Convention in Los Angeles. Chhabria received his J.D. in 1998 from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley and his BA in 1991 from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
BRITAIN APPOINTS INDIAN-ORIGIN PERSON AS UKTI INDIA HEAD
The British government appointed Kumar Iyer as director general for UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) in India. This is a new top level post and has been created to reflect the increasing importance of business ties between the two countries. As UKTI director general, India, Iyer will have overall responsibility for the bilateral commercial and trade relationship. He will also be British deputy high commissioner for western India.
Since 2008, Iyer has been a high-ranking official at the British Treasury and the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit. He has an MPhil in Economics from Cambridge University where he was a Bank of England scholar and an undergraduate tutor in Microeconomics. He was also a Kennedy Scholar and Teaching Fellow in International Capital Markets at Harvard University.
INDIAN-AMERICAN NOMINATED AS ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR SOUTH ASIA
President Barack Obama nominated Nisha Desai-Biswal, an accomplished Indian-American administrator to head the South Asia bureau in the US state department.
Desai will become the first person of Indian or even South Asian origin to head the bureau, which oversees US foreign policy and relations with India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Maldives and Bhutan. She is currently the assistant administrator with USAID, which is headed by Rajiv Shah.
Desai-Biswal's nomination is unprecedented in the sense that the South Asia bureau has always been headed by "all-American" diplomats, although there have been many mid-level staffers who are US-born but are of sub-continental origin.
A graduate of the University of Virginia she began her professional career in Washington DC with the American Red Cross in the mid-90s before she joined USAID. From 2005 to 2010, she was the Majority Clerk for the State Department and Foreign Operations Subcommittee on the Committee on Appropriations in the US, a crucial position close to the purse strings of American foreign aid.
Her appointment was met with much delight in the Indian-American community as this is the first time an Indian-American is heading the South Asia bureau, a new milestone for the community.
IIT-IAN BECOMES DEAN OF TOP SINGAPORE BUSINESS SCHOOL
Ravi Kumar, an alumnus of IIT Madras has been appointed Dean of the Nanyang Business School (NBS) in Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
Kumar previously served in several key positions at the University of South California's (USC) Marshall Business School, including vice dean for international programs and vice dean for graduate programs. He has also served as dean of the College of Business at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, a stint that saw the Korean college break into the top 100 of the Financial Times global MBA rankings.
Kumar also holds a Master of Science degree in industrial engineering from the University of Texas, and a doctorate in philosophy from the industrial engineering and management sciences department at Northwestern University in the US.
RUPA GOSWAMI NAMED LA COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT JUDGE
Governor Jerry Brown's appointment of Rupa S. Goswami of South Pasadena to the Los Angeles County Superior Court marks a historic first. She becomes the first South Asian American woman named to the judiciary in California.
Goswami has worked at the US Attorney's Office in the Central District of California since 2001. Goswami currently works in the Los Angeles-based Central District's environmental crimes section. Her previous positions in the district have included deputy chief of the general crime section, assistant U.S. attorney in the cyber crime section and working in the domestic security, immigration, terrorism and organized crime sections.
In a statement, Puneet V. Kakkar, co-president (with Goswami) of the South Asian Bar Association of Southern California said Goswami has been a trailblazer with respect to the legal issues she tackles and the justice she accomplishes. All of this will only be multiplied now that she is on the bench."
Goswami, who grew up in rural Ohio and Florida, has a JD from the UCLA School of Law and an MBA in finance from the University of Chicago, where she received her bachelor's degree.
INDIAN WOMAN SCIENTIST'S PORTRAIT TO BE EXHIBITED IN BRITAIN
Sunetra Gupta, an India-born chemist and physicist has joined the big league of female scientists in a first-of-its-kind art exhibition at the prestigious Royal Society. The Royal Society display uses portraits by a range of artists to celebrate a few of the leading women in science titled - "does it make a difference?" including nutritionist Elsie Widdowson, astro-biologist Zita Martins among others.
A professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, Gupta is among an exclusive group as part of the Women in Science Portrait Exhibition of the greatest female fellows of the Royal Society together with newly-commissioned drawings featuring Royal Society Research Fellows.
Her main area of interest is the evolution of diversity in pathogens, with particular reference to the infectious disease agents that are responsible for malaria, influenza and bacterial meningitis.
The show has been curated by Uta Frith, a leading British developmental psychologist.
INDIAN PROFESSOR HONORED AT LONDON EALING MAYOR'S PARLOR
82-year-old Indian professor Surjit Hans, who translated all works of William Shakespeare into Punjabi, has been honored with a bust of the 18th century Bard of Avon.
Ealing Mayor Kamaljit S Dhindsa and deputy leader of the Labor Party of Ealing Council Ranjit Dheer presented the bust to Hans in appreciation of his works including translation of 38 plays of Shakespeare
Photo above: Grand Marshal Vidya Balan reviewing the parade along with former Indian Army Chief General V.K. Singh
