Two distinguished Indian-American members of The University of Kansas Cancer Center were recognised as “most productive faculty”, and formally invested with endowed professorships.

Breast medical oncologist Priyanka Sharma and gastroenterologist Prateek Sharma were honoured for their efforts in research and treatment of cancer and gastroenterology.

Priyanka, MD, who was invested with the Frank B. Tyler Cancer Research Professorship, is a leading expert on triple-negative breast cancer. She is a professor in the Department of Medical Oncology at the University of Kansas School of Medicine and co-leader of the cancer center’s Drug Discovery, Delivery and Experimental Therapeutics research program.

Priyanka has dedicated much of her career to identifying more effective therapies to treat this aggressive subtype of breast cancer, a University of Kansas Cancer Center release noted.

She serves as vice chair for the breast committee of SWOG and is a member of the SWOG Board of Governors and National Cancer Institute (NCI) breast cancer steering committee.

Prateek Sharma, MD, professor of medicine and director of GI Fellowship Training at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, was invested with the Elaine Blaylock Cancer Research Professorship.

A renowned gastroenterologist and scientist focusing on esophageal diseases, including cancer, he is president-elect of the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy.

He serves as chair on the Esophageal Committee of World Endoscopy Organization and chairs the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy artificial intelligence task force.

Both professorships are appointed positions made by Roy Jensen, MD, vice chancellor and director of The University of Kansas Cancer Center.

“Priyanka and Prateek Sharma are outstanding leaders and experts in their respective fields,” Jensen said in a statement.

“Through these endowed chairs, both can pursue more innovative ideas and create more inter-disciplinary collaborations leading to advances in cancer care,” he added.

The University of Kansas Cancer Center is the only National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated comprehensive cancer center in the region, and one of only 53 in the nation, to receive this elite distinction.

NCI-designated cancer centers are recognised for their scientific excellence, including their depth and breadth of research.

They are the backbone of innovative research and care across the country, helping to pioneer most groundbreaking advances in cancer treatment.

Ambassador Taranjit Singh Sandhu was presented with the “Sikh Hero Award” from Sikhs of America, an independent organisation.

India’s top diplomat to the US received this award days after the violence at the Indian missions in the US by a small group of pro-Khalistan supporters. The Khalistan supporters recently incited violence at the Embassy of India and personally targeted Sandhu.

India’s top diplomat to the US Taranjit Singh Sandhu received the “Sikh Hero Award” from Sikhs of America along with several other eminent Sikh Americans. Taranjit Singh Sandhu was targeted by Khalistan supporters at the Embassy of India in the United States.

While making his address after receiving the award, he made a strong and significant stand against the separatists and gave a strong message to Khalistan Supporters.

“The Khalsa flag, which flies at the Takht (Golden Temple) and Nishan Sahibs, is a flag of unity, peace and universal love, use this symbol but do not insult it,” said Sandhu in an apparent reference to the instances of violence by a small group of separatists in the US, Canada, UK and Australia holding the Khalistani flag.”

“Khalsa, which was created on the Baisakhi day, by Guru Gobind Singh is a uniting and not a dividing force,” he added.

“We must keep these cardinal virtues in mind and not what a couple of mischievous characters spin using virtual media,” he said in an apparent reference to the so-called Khalistan leaders’ messages on social media.

Sandhu encouraged the Sikh diaspora to connect with their roots and said “Punjab and the youth in Punjab need to be connected with the economic, financial, tech and digital revolution happening in India.”

“The government, people and in particular the youth must take advantage of the expanding partnership with the US in various fields that Prime Minister Modi and President Biden are trying to implement,” he said.

Last month, Pro-Khalistan supporters in the US threatened the Indian embassy and Indian Ambassador to the United States Taranjit Singh Sandhu during their protest. While rallying outside the mission, a protestor in his speech made a direct threat to the Ambassador that the “hypocrisy” will come to an end and that the Ambassador could face a similar fate to what former president of India Zail Singh faced back in 1994.

Multiple incidents of protests by supporters of Khalistan have been staged outside the Indian embassy and the San Francisco Consulate. Earlier, the Indian Consulate in San Francisco was also attacked in March. A video has surfaced on social media in which pro-Khalistani protestors gathered at the consulate in San Francisco, shouting slogans in support of Amritpal and heckling staff as they abandoned the diplomatic mission.

The protesters made vague claims that the “Indian government is killing citizens from all communities all over the country.”

“This hypocrisy comes to an end now…… There will come a day when the windows of your cars will break and you will have nowhere to run to,” they threatened the Indian embassy with slogans of “Khalistan Zindabad”.
Hundreds of Khalistan supporters gathered outside the Indian Embassy in the United States.

The protesters included turbaned men of all ages who raised pro-Khalistan slogans. They came in from different parts of the DC-Maryland-Virginia (DMV) area. The organisers used mics to make anti-India speeches both in English and Punjabi and targeted the Punjab Police for alleged human rights violations.

The California Civil Rights Department (CRD) has dismissed a caste discrimination case against two Indian-origin Cisco engineers — Sundar Iyer and Ramana Kompella, while still keeping alive its litigation against the Silicon Valley tech giant.

A mediation conference between Cisco and the CRD is still scheduled to be held on 2 May.

What was the case?

The two Cisco supervisors accused in the department’s lawsuit of discriminating and harassing an employee on the basis of caste – a division of people based on birth or descent.

Last week, the Santa Clara Superior Court had dismissed the case. The employee belonged to the Dalit community.

The CRD case, filed in July 2020, made headlines in the US and in India.

California’s lawsuit against Cisco, meanwhile, alleged that the Dalit engineer received less pay and fewer opportunities and that the defendants retaliated against him when he opposed “unlawful practices, contrary to the traditional order between the Dalit and higher castes”.

The engineer worked on a team at Cisco’s San Jose headquarters with Indians who all immigrated to the US as adults, and all of whom were of high caste, the lawsuit stated.

The lawsuit against Cisco and its engineers led to a start of a movement against caste discrimination led by groups such as Oakland, California-based Equality Labs.

The Civil Rights Department voluntarily dismissing its case against the two engineers is a vindication for activists who have held the position that “the state has no right to attribute wrongdoing to Hindu and Indian Americans simply because of their religion or ethnicity,” said Suhag Shukla, executive director of the Hindu American Foundation.

“Two Indian Americans endured a nearly three year nightmare of unending investigations, a brutal online witch hunt and a presumption of guilt in the media,” she said.

Thenmozhi Soundararajan, founder and executive director of Equality Labs, a Dalit-led advocacy group, last week said that the action “does not change anything” including the fact that the Cisco case “has given so many Dalits the courage to come forward with their stories about caste discrimination in education, the medical and tech industries.”

“This is not a loss, but progress,” she said. “The Dalit community owes (the engineer) and the Civil Rights Department gratitude for having the courage to bring such a historic case forward.”

Maryland Governor Wes Moore has announced that Indian-American delegate Kumar Barve will be appointed to the US state’s Public Service Commission after the 2023 legislative session.

Barve is the first Indian-American elected to a state legislature in the US.

He has been a member of the House of Delegates since January 1991.

“I am proud to announce the selection of Delegate Kumar Barve to serve on the Public Service Commission. He is a veteran of the Maryland House of Delegates and his leadership within the Environment and Transportation Committee makes him the ideal candidate for this role,” Moore said in a statement.

The Governor added that he is confident in Barve’s ability to bolster his administration’s commitment to environmental stewardship while ensuring rate payers are protected.

The Public Service Commission regulates public utilities and certain passenger transportation companies doing business in Maryland.

The Commission’s jurisdiction extends to taxicabs operating in Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Cumberland and Hagerstown.

While representing District 17 in Montgomery County, Barve served as Chair of the Environment and Transportation Committee since 2015.

He also served as Democratic House Majority Leader from 2003-2015.

His various policy accomplishments include economic development, environmental regulation, energy generation, energy conservation, greenhouse gas reduction and tax policy.

He sponsored several climate change laws, led Maryland’s effort to promote high tech job creation, and was a central player in closing corporate tax loopholes and in transforming Maryland’s tax code to be more progressive.

Having more than 40 years of experience as an accountant, Barve has been the Chief Financial Officer of the Environmental Management Services, Inc since 1993.

He was the Financial Manager of UNISYS Corporation from 1987 to 1990; and from 1981-1987, he was the Economic/Proposal Manager of the Space Communications Corporation.

Barve has a Bachelor of Science in accounting from Georgetown University.

In 2017, he was awarded the League of Conservation Voters Legislator of the Year.

He also received India Abroad Lifetime Service Award in 2013, followed by Tech Council of Maryland Technology Advocate of the Year in 2008 and 2006.

Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, a prominent Indian-American mathematician and statistician, will receive the 2023 International Prize in Statistics, the equivalent to the Nobel Prize in the field, for his monumental work 75 years ago that revolutionised statistical thinking.

Rao’s work, more than 75 years ago, continues to exert a profound influence on science, the International Prize in Statistics Foundation said in a statement.

Rao, who is now 102, will receive the prize, which comes with a $80,000 award, this July at the biennial International Statistical Institute World Statistics Congress in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

“In awarding this prize, we celebrate the monumental work by C R Rao that not only revolutionized statistical thinking in its time but also continues to exert enormous influence on human understanding of science across a wide spectrum of disciplines,” said Guy Nason, chair of the International Prize in Statistics Foundation.

In his remarkable 1945 paper published in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society, Rao demonstrated three fundamental results that paved the way for the modern field of statistics and provided statistical tools heavily used in science today, the Foundation said in a statement on April 1.

The first, now known as the Cramer-Rao lower bound, provides a means for knowing when a method for estimating a quantity is as good as any method can be, it said.

The second result, named the Rao-Blackwell Theorem (because it was discovered independently by eminent statistician David Blackwell), provides a means for transforming an estimate into a better—in fact, an optimal—estimate. Together, these results form a foundation on which much of statistics is built, the statement said.

And the third result provided insights that pioneered a new interdisciplinary field that has flourished as “information geometry.” Combined, these results help scientists more efficiently extract information from data, the statement added.

Information geometry has recently been used to aid the understanding and optimization of Higgs boson measurements at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

It has also found applications in recent research on radars and antennas and contributed significantly to advancements in artificial intelligence, data science, signal processing, shape classification, and image segregation.

The Rao-Blackwell process has been applied to stereology, particle filtering, and computational econometrics, among others, while the Cramer-Rao lower bound is of great importance in such diverse fields as signal processing, spectroscopy, radar systems, multiple image radiography, risk analysis, and quantum physics.

Rao was born to a Telugu family in Hadagali, Karnataka. His schooling was completed in Gudur, Nuzvid, Nandigama, and Visakhapatnam, all in Andhra Pradesh.

He received an MSc in mathematics from Andhra University and an MA in statistics from Calcutta University in 1943. He obtained a PhD degree at King’s College at Cambridge University. He added a DSc degree, also from Cambridge, in 1965. Rao first worked at the Indian Statistical Institute and the Anthropological Museum in Cambridge.

Later he held several important positions, as the Director of the Indian Statistical Institute, Jawaharlal Nehru Professor and National Professor in India, University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and Eberly Professor and Chair of Statistics and Director of the Center for Multivariate Analysis at Pennsylvania State University.

He is currently a professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and Research Professor at the University at Buffalo. Rao has received many honours. He was awarded the title of Padma Bhushan by the Indian Government (1968) and Padma Vibhushan in 2001.

The International Prize in Statistics is awarded every two years by a collaboration among five leading international statistics organisations.

The prize recognises a major achievement by an individual or team in the statistics field, particularly an achievement of powerful and original ideas that have led to practical applications and breakthroughs in other disciplines.

Bradley Efron received the award in 2019 for a statistical method known as the bootstrap, a clever computational method for assessing uncertainty in applied statistics. Nan Laird received the award in 2021 for the development of powerful methods that have made possible the analysis of complex longitudinal studies.