Kalpana Chawla's love of flying led to her career as a NASA astronaut. She started her higher education in India, earning a B.S. in aeronautical engineering from Punjab Engineering College in 1982. Moving to the U.S., she turned to aerospace engineering and received her M.S. from the University of Texas and her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado. Chawla joined NASA in 1995 and was assigned as mission specialist on the space shuttle STS-87 in 1997, becoming the first Indian-American woman to go into space. She was a crew member on the Shuttle Columbia when it broke up upon reentry to the Earth's atmosphere in February 2003.
If you're serious about your stereo equipment, you probably own or have owned Bose speakers! Amar Bose was born and raised in Philadelphia, the son of a political dissident who moved from Calcutta. As a teenager, Bose earned money by repairing model trains and then transistors, practical experience which helped when he went on to MIT to study electrical engineering. His speaker system was one of the first to make use of sound reflecting off walls and the ceiling. In 1964 he founded the Bose Corporation, which has developed car stereo systems, the Wave radio, as well as noise canceling headsets used by pilots and space-shuttle astronauts.
Chandrasekhar earned a B.S. in physics at Presidency College, Madras, then went on to earn advanced degrees at Cambridge University, and a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College. In 1937 he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. There he delved into such astrophysical subjects as stellar structure, the theory of white dwarf stars, and the mathematical theory of black holes. Chandrasekhar shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars.” NASA renamed the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility for him: the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which helps astronomers better understand the structure and evolution of the universe.
Steven Chu shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. In 1978 he went to work at Bell Laboratories, where he did his award-winning work. He went on to teach at Stanford and continued his work and also did research on polymer physics and biology. In 2004 he was named director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. President-elect Barack Obama nominated Chu as his secretary of energy.
Lue Gim Gong
In 1885, Lue moved to Deland, Florida, where Fannie and her sister had bought land, and began to work in the orange groves. There he developed the extraordinary horticultural contributions that would earn him the title “citrus wizard.” The most famous of his creations was the “Lue Gim Gong orange.” These oranges would mature in August or September, ensuring that the fruit would not freeze and be ruined. It was an enormous advance for the citrus industry. He also developed a grapefruit that grew individually on the tree rather than in clusters, a strongly scented grapefruit, and a rosebush that produced seven varieties of roses.
David Ho earned his B.S. in physics from Caltech, but was soon attracted to molecular biology and the cutting-edge technology of gene splicing. He went on to the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology. The AIDS epidemic beckoned as a challenge and he began studying the virus at Massachusetts General Hospital and UCLA School of Medicine. Realizing that AIDS was an infectious disease and that HIV multiplies many times right from the start, Ho and his team administered a combination of protease-inhibitor and antiviral drug “cocktails” to early-stage AIDS patients with dramatic results. For his inroads into the vicious disease, Ho was named Time's 1996 Man of the Year. Ho continues his work at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center.
Narinder S. Kapany
The “father of fiber optics,” Narinder Kapany grew up in northern India, where a teacher informed him that light only traveled in a straight line. He took this as a challenge and made the study of light his life work. He studied physics at Agra University and went on to advanced studies in optics at the Imperial College of Science in London. In 1954 Nature published his report of successfully transmitting images through fiber optical bundles. He also founded Kaptron Inc. and K2 Optronics. He has taught at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and Stanford University. Kapany was the founding chairman and major funder of the Sikh Foundation, which runs programs in publishing, academia, and the arts.
Chanchao received her Ph.D. from Suranaree University of Technology, where she studied mammalian embryo development and stem cell biology. Her focus is to identify factors affecting lineage differentiation in preimplantation embryo. Her work has demonstrated that not only the positional-information, but also proper expression levels of Hippo component genes play significant role in lineage segregation and differentiation in preimplantation embryos. She now works as a researcher investigating the role of Hippo signaling pathway in mammalian embryo and stem cells.
Varisa is an Assistant Professor at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, investigating the role of CAMSAP proteins on cancer cell biology. Varisa is the first author of a paper published in Journal of Cell Science which investigates the role of CAMSAP3 on lung cancer cell migration.
Dr. Hasibun Naher
Dr. Hasibun Naher received her PhD from the School of Mathematical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). She is now working as an Associate Professor in mathematics at the Department of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, BRAC University (BU), in Bangladesh. She has published twenty five scientific papers in international journals. She is also serving as an International Scientific Committee with several International Conferences on Mathematics.
Dr. Tamal Lata Aditya
Dr. Tamal Lata Aditya has significantly contributed to the development and dissemination of over 12 improved rice varieties and 12 promising advanced breeding lines that primarily respond to drought and yield challenges. She has authored and co-authored multiple peer-reviewed scientific papers and presented works at many national and International conferences.
Surapa Thiemjarus is a researcher from the National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC), National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA), Thailand. She received her PhD degree in Computing from Imperial College, UK in 2007. Her research interests include context-aware and pervasive sensing, body sensor networks and applications, sensor fusion, machine learning, pattern recognition, sound and signal processing, and assistive technologies. She is currently a managing editor and an associate editor of the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.