Dr Rajani Panchang, UGC Assistant Professor from the Department of Environmental Science, Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU), has been awarded the prestigious Fulbright-Kalam Climate Fellowship for Academic and Professional Excellence 2025.
During her fellowship, Dr Panchang shall be working with world-renowned distinguished scientist Prof Pamela Hallock and shall be hosted by Dr Michael Martinez-Colon at Florida A&M at Tallahassee, Florida, for nine months starting mid-November 2025.
During her Fulbright tenure in the USA, Dr Panchang shall be quantifying the responses of marine bio-calcifiers, essentially coral reef foraminifera, to ocean acidification through field studies in the Florida Reef Tract and laboratory experiments. Her work will also integrate analysis of atmospheric data and bio-calcifying specimens collected since the 1980s.
By understanding how resilient or susceptible shelled organisms are to ocean acidification due to the ever-increasing anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, Dr Panchang aims to bring in realistic scenarios of biological impact to help financial and policy provisioning for sustainable oceans.
She believes life is the best indicator of environmental change and training local youth to identify biological responses of ocean acidification will save time, money and carbon footprints currently involved in advanced analytical methods of ocean monitoring.
The Fulbright-Kalam Climate Fellowship for Academic and Professional Excellence is an opportunity for Indian faculty and researchers to conduct climate-related research in the US for 8 to 12 months. It is administered by the United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF). The programme aims to build long-term capacity to address climate change issues in both the US and India by engaging scientific and technical research scholars from both countries.
Dr Rajani Panchang is the only earth scientist in the country and one of the four researchers in the country to have been awarded in this category this year. She earned her PhD from CSIR – National Institute of Oceanography, Panaji, Goa, in 2008 and has served as a Woman Scientist at Agharkar Research Institute, Pune and SERB Fast-Track Scientist at IISER Pune under various research programmes of the Government of India’s Department of Science & Technology.
Dr Panchang is a recipient of the Mani Shankar Shukla Gold Medal (2015) from the Palaeontological Society of India & Research Fellowships from German Academic Exchange (DAAD), CSIR (2006), Lila Poonawalla Foundation (2000) and Hindustan Unilever (2004). She has been felicitated by former President of India Dr APJ Abdul Kalam for being an outstanding LILA Fellow in the field of Oceanography in 2005.
