Alumni in the News July 14

President Obama has announced that Harmit Singh Malik, Ph.D. has been awarded the nation's highest honor for scientists at the beginning of their independent research careers. He is among 100 researchers to receive the prestigious 2008 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Each will be honored in a ceremony this fall at the White House. An evolutionary biologist, Malik is an associate member of the Hutchinson Center's Basic Sciences Division and an affiliate assistant professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He was nominated for the honor by the National Science Foundation, which supports his work. Earlier this year he also was appointed a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist.

Malik, a native of India, received his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. He completed his doctoral work in molecular evolutionary biology at the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y., where, under the mentorship of Tom Eickbush, Ph.D., he first became intrigued by the study of genetic conflict. Malik joined the Hutchinson Center faculty in 2003.

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Paul Beckett, WSJ bureau chief in New Delhi, emails with Sanjay Bhargava on universal financial access and what it means for rural India.

Sanjay Bhargava was one of the chief business architects of PayPal, the payment service now owned by E-Bay Inc. A graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad ... he founded the Universal Financial Access (UFA) movement in India (www.ufa-india.org) with the goal of securing financial inclusion for all Indians initially through a unique national identity and a bank account by 2010 and then universal access by 2013. He describes himself as UFA Evangelist Number One. Mr. Bhargava has been living in New Delhi since 2004.

WSJ: Why is Universal Financial Access important for rural India?
Sanjay Bhargava: Universal Financial Access is one of the main enablers in the fight against poverty and a key component of truly inclusive development.

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Meditation, in today’s time is more of a necessity, for our mind continues to work, and we are not able to calm it. Meditation helps us do that and as a result, we eat, sleep and work better,’’ Swami Pragyapad, a member of the international faculty, The Art of Living International Foundation, Bangalore, talks about the Sehaj Samadhi Course of Art of Living ... a graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai, the quest for something better led Pragyapad to the Art o f Living and it transformed his life.
 

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