Indian-Americans Sonali Shukla McDermid and Neel Sukhatme are among the honourees of the Andrew Carnegie Fellows program this year, which recently announced its latest group of Fellows. Sonali Shukla is an associate professor at New York University’s Department of Environmental Studies.
As part of her research, Shukla explores the role of landscapes in our climate system with the aid of various models and observational datasets. As per Shukla’s bio, her particular interest lies in the several ways that agriculture is responsible for driving and being vulnerable to global environmental change.
Shukla is affiliated with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. There, she is responsible for developing the land surface component of a state-of-the-art climate model. She has also served as climate co-lead for the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project to assess how climate change affects agriculture and food security across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
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Shukla is a contributing author to the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land and serves as the food security section editor for CABI Agriculture and Bioscience. She has recently been awarded the Fulbright-Kalam Scholarship for her work on climate and agriculture.
Earlier, a NASA post-doctoral fellow at NASA GISS, Shukla holds a B.A. in physics from NYU and a masters and PhD from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University.
A project is called “Assessing Climate Mitigation, Adaptation, and Socioeconomic Co-Benefits: A Rice Case-Study”.
Neel Sukhatme’s bio notes that he is an associate professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center and is affiliated faculty at Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy, besides being the Thomas Alva Edison Visiting Scholar at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In his empirical research, Sukhatme used his training and experience as an economist, and his experience as a practising attorney, covering various topics in criminal law, courts, and patents and innovation.
Sukhatme recently co-founded a nonpartisan nonprofit that helps restore voting rights for people who have previously been convicted of a felony – Free Our Vote.
His project is called “The Impact of Criminal Sanctions on the Social and Economic Fabric of Families”.
The Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program provides philanthropic support for scholarships in the humanities and social sciences. This year, the Fellows will conduct research across topics including voting access, climate change, pandemic recovery and racial justice.
