INDIAN AMERICAN FARAH PANDITH TO REPRESENT MUSLIM COMMUNITIES
 
Indian American Farah Pandith has been formally sworn in as the first U.S. Special Representative to Muslim communities as part of the Obama Administration's efforts to reach out to the Islamic world. At a ceremony at the State Department, Ms. Farah's mother held the Koran on which she took the oath administered by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
 
Ms. Pandith, whose family migrated from Jammu and Kashmir in the late 1960s, is the first Special Representative to Muslim Communities of the United States.
 
"It is apparent now more than ever that we have to do more to promote dialogue and diplomacy, and Farah will play a key role in that process for us," said Ms. Clinton.
 
NINE INDIAN AMERICANS WORK AT THE WHITE HOUSE
 
At least nine Indian-origin people work in the White House, with some getting $100,000 or more a year, official figures released by President Barack Obama's office have revealed.
 
Sonal Shah, who's the deputy assistant to the US President and director at Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. There are two directors of special projects, Rachana Bhowmick and Aditya Kumar who is also special assistant to Office of Chief of Staff,

Anisha Dasgupta who works as a Counsel and Pradeep Ramamurthy is the Director of Response Policy. Kavita Patel who is the Director of Policy for the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement, while Shomik Dutta is Special Assistant to White House Counsel.

Manashi Deshpande is the White House Policy Advisor and Taara Rangarajan is Deputy Associate Director.
 
INDIAN AMERICAN ARUN MAJUMDAR IS APPOINTED AMERICA'S GREEN CZAR
 
President Obama has named Dr. Arun Majumdar as the first Director of the US Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), an agency tasked with reducing America's reliance on foreign energy supplies, cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and improving energy efficiency.

"It is a rare privilege and an honor when the President asks you to serve the nation in such a capacity," said Majumdar of his nomination. , which, while needing to be confirmed by the Senate, sent ripples across the country's scientific-academic community. "I came to this country as an immigrant and am deeply appreciative and indebted to this nation for opening the doors and welcoming me with open arms. I have received so much. This is my way of stepping up and paying back."

Ever since he joined the University of California (UC), Berkeley faculty in 1997, where he holds the Almy and Agnes Maynard Chair Professorship in the College of Engineering and heads the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Majumdar has cemented the Lab's role as a world-renowned leader in energy efficiency research in close collaboration with India and China - a feat the White House has been quick to recognize and reward.

Among the lab's partnerships is the Berkeley-India Joint Leadership on Energy and the Environment announced last year, which brings together researchers from Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, and other US and Indian universities and institutions, with a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining sustained economic growth in both nations.

Another partnership between the Lab and China's Tsinghua University is to promote the shared development and implementation of building energy efficiency, a move intended to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in the US and China.

In fact, Majumdar's mentor in academia was Professor Chang-Lin Tien, a legendary Chinese Don who went to become the Chancellor of UC Berkeley in 1990, the first Asian to head a major university in the United States.

Majumdar's India-China connections is what appears to have driven the Obama White House to choose him for the new job, considering the two countries are thought to be pivotal in the upcoming energy debate. For more than a decade, Majumdar, who is also the founding chair of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' Nanotechnology Institute, has been the country's leading materials scientist, making spectacular advances in energy conservation. He was recently credited with developing a way to use silicon nanowires to capture and use the energy lost as heat during the production of electricity. The futuristic technology could someday be used to convert the large amounts of waste heat into useful electricity.

A graduate (mechanical engineering) of IIT-Mumbai, Majumdar came to the US in 1985 and received a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. His nomination continues the steady march of Indian geeks and academics in the higher echelons of administration. The Obama administration picked Indian-Americans for the post of White House Chief Information Officer (Vivek Kundra) and Chief Technology Officer (Aneesh Chopra). Majumdar will effectively be the Chief Energy Officer.
 
PRESIDENT OBAMA NOMINATES DR. ISLAM SIDDIQUI AS US TRADE REPRESENTATIVE
 
Indian American Dr. Islam A "A" Siddiqui has been nominated by president Obama as the Chief Agricultural Negotiator at the Office of the US Trade Representative. Once confirmed, Dr. Siddiqui will work with India and other developing countries on contentious agricultural issues that have thus far proved a sticking pointy at the World Trade Organization's stalled Doha Round.
 
Born in Haldwani, Uttarachal, Dr. Siddiqui currently serves as the vice president, Science and Regulatory Affairs, at the Washington, DC-based CropLife America, where he is responsible for regulatory and international trade issues related to crop protection chemicals. Earlier, he served as CropLife America's vice president for Agricultural Biotechnology and Trade. He has also led CropLife International's initiative to achieve reduction/elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers against crop protection chemicals as part of the WTO Doha Round. This included organizing seminars and briefings at the WTO headquarters in Geneva on tariff elimination for the chemical sector in coordination with the International Council of Chemical Associations, European Chemical Industry Association and the American Chemistry Council.
 
Dr. Siddiqui also represented CropLife America as a NGO at the WTO Ministerial Conference in December 2005 and at the International Conference of Chemical Management in February 2006. From 1997 to 2001, Siddiqui held senior positions in the Clinton Administration, including Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs in the Department of Agriculture, which at the time made him the senior-most Indian American in US government.

Dr. Siddiqui also served as Senior Trade Advisor to then Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman and Deputy Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs, where he worked closely with the USTR and represented United States Department of Agriculture in bilateral, regional and multi-lateral agricultural trade negotiations. When Former US President Bill Clinton visited South Asia in March 2000, Siddiqui was the only Indian American who was part of the US delegation that traveled with Clinton on Air Force One.
 
From 2004 to 2008, Dr. Siddiqui served on the US Department of Commerce's Industry Trade Advisory Committee on Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals, and Health/Science Products and Services, which advised the Secretary of Commerce and USTR on international trade issues related to these sectors. Before joining the Clinton Administration, he had spent nearly three decades with the California Department of Food and Agriculture in Sacramento, beginning in 1969 as a nematologist in the Department's Division on Plant Industry and rising to director of the Division, in which position he served from 1984 to 1997, when he was tapped by President Clinton to be the Deputy Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs at the USDA.
 
An alumnus of Uttar Pradesh Agricultural University in Pantnagar, from where he received his bachelor of science degree majoring in plant protection, Siddiqui came to the US after graduation in 1964. He received his master of science and PhD from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1966 and 1969 respectively, majoring in plant pathology.
 
After getting his doctoral degree, Dr. Siddiqui joined the California Department of Food and Agriculture where he served for 28 years. As director, Division of Plant Industry, Siddiqui developed the Mediterranean Fruit Fly (Medfly) Eradication Program in response to public opposition to the continued use of Malathion aerial sprays in local communities. As a result, Mefly infestations have not been found since that time.
 
SINGAPORE PROFESSOR RAJA MOHAN APPOINTED AS KISSINGER SCHOLAR AT THE US LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
 
Prof. C. Raja Mohan of South Asian studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore has been appointed by James H. Billington, Librarian of US Congress as the Henry Alfred Kissinger Scholar in Foreign Policy and International Relations in the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.
 
Prof. Mohan, a leading Indian foreign-policy analyst, will research the evolution of India's foreign policy strategy and its growing security cooperation with the United States. He is the ninth scholar to occupy the Kissinger chair. The position was created in 2000 to honor Henery Kissinger former secretary of state and to emphasize the importance of foreign affairs. The Kissinger Chair offers outstanding thinkers and practitioners a unique opportunity to pursue advanced research in the largest and most international collection of library materials in the world.
 
Mohan has served in the past as the strategic-affairs editor and Washington correspondent for The Hindu. He is a contributing editor for The Indian Express, New Delhi. He was professor of South Asian studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and was also a senior fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. His published works include "Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India's Foreign Policy" (2004) and "Impossible Allies: Nuclear India, United States and the Global Order" (2006).
 
TWO INDIAN AMERICANS RECEIVE MARSHALL SCHOLARSHIPS
 
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation last month named 24 new MacArthur Fellows for 2009. The new Fellows work across a broad spectrum of endeavors. They include an infectious disease physician, an ornithologist, a painter, a photojournalist, a bridge engineer, a climate scientist, an economist, a papermaker, a mental health lawyer, and a poet. All were selected for their creativity, originality, and potential to make important contributions in the future.
 
The MacArthur scholarships were founded by an Act of British Parliament in 1953 and commemorate the humane ideals of the European Recovery Programme (Marshall Plan). They are funded by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and administered by the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission in the UK (for which the Association of Commonwealth Universities provides the Secretariat). The selection process in the US is managed by the British Council, on behalf of the British Embassy in Washington DC, and the regional Consulates-General in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco.
 
Two Indian Americans are among this year's scholars. They are Dr. Maneesh Agrawala is  Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA) and Dr. L. Mahadevan, De Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
 
Dr. Maneesh Agrawala is a computer scientist designing visual interfaces that enhance our ability to understand large quantities of complex information. Working at the intersection of visualization, human-computer interaction, and computer graphics, Agrawala draws on cognitive psychology to identify the key perceptual and design principles underlying graphic illustrations. His algorithms automatically generate legible and effective designs for a variety of data types. As a graduate student, Agrawala developed LineDrive, a fully automated system for rendering route maps that both takes into account myriad cognitive factors involved in a user's navigation of routes and adapts cartographic techniques for emphasizing essential information.
 
Agrawala also developed a system that generates accurate and intelligible step-by-step assembly instructions for everyday items as well as complex machines (e.g., aircraft engines). The system utilizes exploded views - so that individual components of the object are spatially separated - in order to provide the user with a more direct understanding of the actual steps required for assembly. Agrawala and colleagues subsequently expanded on this work to create a program that produces illustrations of complex, three-dimensional objects, such as anatomical models. The program includes an interface that allows users to explore the spatial relationships among components by isolating parts of an object to magnify, expand, or collapse. Agrawala's novel approach to visualization and computer communication in these and many other projects is transforming how we use, synthesize, and comprehend the ever-increasing volume of digital information we encounter in our daily lives.
 
Agrawala received a B.S. (1994) and a Ph.D. (2002) from Stanford University. He was affiliated with Microsoft Research (2002-2006) prior to joining the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where he is currently an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
 
Dr. L. Mahadevan is a mathematician who applies complex mathematical analyses to a variety of seemingly simple, but vexing, questions across the physical and biological sciences - how cloth folds when draped, how skin wrinkles, how flags flutter, how Venus flytraps snap closed. Through his explorations of shape and motion, in many different material types, sizes, and time frames, Mahadevan strives to identify commonalities of the fundamental nonlinear and nonequilibrium behavior driving them.
 
One line of his research considers the relationship between the biochemistry and mechanics of structural molecules that form polymers, such as actin, within the cell. These investigations have parallels in his work on the hydrodynamics and elasticity of thin films and sheets (e.g., made of fabric). Mahadevan also considers properties of materials at larger scales, such as cell shape, adhesion, and migration in developmental biology, avalanche dynamics, or the role of water in determining the tensile characteristics of plants. Though he searches for and elucidates mathematical principles underpinning these complex behaviors, his focus remains on developing hypotheses that can be confirmed or rejected empirically in the lab. The unusually broad scope of his theoretical and experimental investigations defies facile categorization, but they are linked by an effort to discover the geometric and mechanical principles that determine the behavior of complex biological and physical systems.
 
L. Mahadevan received a B.Tech. (1986) from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, an M.S. (1987) from the University of Texas at Austin, and an M.S. (1992) and Ph.D. (1995) from Stanford University. Since 2003, he has been affiliated with Harvard University, where he is currently the De Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics. He served previously as an assistant and associate professor (1996-2000) in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as the Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems (2001-2003) in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and a fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He holds visiting professorships at the University of Oxford's Mathematics Institute and the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India.
 
INDIAN AMERICAN PROFESSOR ANIL MATHUR'S FICTION NOVEL PUBLISHED
 
Dr. Anil Mathur, a long-time Jericho, Long Island, resident, has launched his third book, The Code Breaker. A mystery and action thriller, readers from the Indian Subcontinent will find this book especially appealing because a significant part of the action in this book takes place in India.
 
The Code Breaker is the story of Sara Hartsfield, an investigative reporter for a TV news channel. While on an assignment in India, she came into possession of an ancient document containing some kind of secret code. Her curiosity drives her to travel all over the world and risk her life, trying to unearth the secret of the document. She also meets scientists and scholars, trying to get to the bottom of the secret.
 
The Code Breaker is an extensively researched book grounded in Historical and scientific facts. Dr. Mathur takes his readers on a journey full of excitement and discovery. How and when he expertly takes his readers from historical and scientific facts to the domain of fiction is shrouded in the eloquent and swift narrative and very difficult to figure out.
 
Dr. Anil Mathur is Vice Dean and Brodlieb Distinguished Professor of Business at the Frank G. Zarb School of Business at Hofstra University. An award winning researcher as well as educator, Dr. Mathur has published extensively in the field of marketing, including two co-authored books: Baby Boomers and Their Parents (Paramount Books, 2007) and The Maturing Marketplace: Buying Habits of Baby Boomers and their Parents (Quorum Books, 2000). The Code Breaker is his first work of fiction.
 
For more information about The Code Breaker, please e-mail Dr. Mathur at Anil.Mathur@TheCodeBreakerNovel.com. Or visit www.TheCodeBreakerNovel.com.
 
The Code Breaker is available at www.Amazon.com Paperback - ISBN 97814486884656