Akhilesh Gaharwar Honored with Chorafas Award
The Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation was established in March 1992 in collaboration with the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Natural Sciences. The Chorafas Foundation funds the Research Awards in order to reward exceptional performance, encourage significant future contributions to science and technology, and help in completing a higher degree and/or significant research project. The Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation foundation awards 20-25 prizes each year to students from selected universities in Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia. As of today, there are 26 partner universities in 15 countries. The participating institutions from the USA are MIT, Columbia, UCLA and Purdue.
Gaharwar has received many awards during the last 4 years as a Ph.D.-pursuing graduate student under Professor Gudrun Schmidt. He was awarded the 2010 Student Travel Achievement Recognition (STAR) Honorable Mention for the Biomaterials Society Annual Conference, 2010 Purdue Graduate Student Government (PGSG) Travel Grant, and has 14 total publications and 10 oral presentations. This culminated in the January 2011 cover picture of the journal “Macromolecular Rapid Communications”. Recently, Gaharwar received a post-doctoral offer from Dr. Robert Langer at MIT and is planning to join his group in March 2011.