Akhilesh Gaharwar Honored with Chorafas Award

Gudrun Schmidt, Akhilesh Gaharwar, Melba Crawford, George Wodicka
Akhilesh Gaharwar (2nd from left) receives the Chorafas Award from Prof. Gudrun Schmidt, Dean Melba Crawford, and BME Head George Wodicka
Akhilesh Gaharwar, Weldon Graduate Student
Akhilesh Gaharwar, Weldon Graduate Student
Akhilesh Gaharwar, Weldon graduate student with Professor Schmidt, has received the College of Engineering 2010 Chorafas Foundation award. Gaharwar was awarded for his submission, “Design and Development of Polymer Bio-nanocomposites for Repair of Orthopedic Tissues”. The award includes a cash prize, historically intended to aid in advanced research opportunities, including travel expenses to visit Nobel Laureate’s labs around the world and travel to national conferences to present papers.

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.