Ahilan Arulanantham

Category: Legal Services

During his tenure at ACLU SoCal, Ahilan has successfully litigated several landmark cases, including Nadarajah v. Gonzales, the first Ninth Circuit case establishing limits on the government’s power to detain immigrants as national security threats; Rodriguez v. Robbins, which required the government to provide bond hearings to thousands of immigration detainees; and Franco v. Holder, the first case to establish a right to appointed legal representation for any group of immigrants facing deportation, which required the federal government to provide legal representation to mentally ill immigrants.

In 2007, Ahilan was named one of California Lawyer Magazine’s Lawyers of the Year for his work at the intersection of immigrants’ rights and national security. In 2007, 2008, 2009, 2012 and 2013: Ahilan was named One of the Daily Journal’s Top 100 Lawyers in California. In 2010, he received the Arthur C. Helton Human Rights Award by the American Immigration Lawyers’ Association. Ahilan has testified before both the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate on national security and immigrants’ rights issues.

Ahilan has also served as a Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School, where he taught a course on preventive detention. Prior to joining the ACLU SoCal in 2004, Ahilan was an Assistant Federal Public Defender in El Paso, Texas for two years. Before that, he was an Equal Justice Works/NAPIL fellow at the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project in New York. Ahilan is a former law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a graduate of Yale Law School, and a graduate of Oxford University, which he attended as a Marshall Scholar.

Bhi Bhiman

Category: Music

Bhi Ramesvara Bhiman was born and raised in St. Louis, MO. Bhiman had an allAmerican childhood that he has referred to as “a sort of Brown Norman Rockwell existence with lots of running around in creeks and playing baseball”.He played in the city’s most competitive leagues from ages 7–17, often traveling for tournaments including trips to The Dominican Republic, Hawaii, and Australia.

When Bhiman was 13, an injury during a tournament in Paducah, Kentucky, kept him off the field for six months. He passed the time playing his brother’s guitar and discovered a strong musical sensibility. As a teenager, Bhiman played electric guitar, and fell in love with hardrock bands like ACDC and Black Sabbath as well as Seattle’s grunge scene.He has cited Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil as a particularly important musical influence. It was not until Bhiman’s time at the University of California Santa Cruz that he began to explore singing and writing songs. He formed the band Hippie Grenade in 2002 and eventually moved to San Francisco with the band to pursue music more seriously.

In 2008, Bhiman left Hippie Grenade to focus on his solo career. In 2011, he began work on what would be his first nationally distributed album. The bulk of the record was tracked at Tiny Telephone Studios in San Francisco. Following those sessions, Bhiman finished the album with producer Sam Kassirer (Josh Ritter, Langhorn Slim) at the Great North Sound Society in Parsonsfield, Maine. Bhiman was released in 2012 and earned rave reviews from publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and esteemed rock critic Robert Christgau of NPR’s All Things Considered.

Dr. Ramanathan Raju

Category: Medicine

Ramanathan (Ram) Raju, MD, MBA, FACS, FACHE is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC), the largest municipal healthcare system in the nation. Dr. Raju was appointed by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in January 2014 to lead the 37,000 employees of this $6.7 billion corporation, which includes 11 acute care hospitals, five nursing homes, six large diagnostic and treatment centers, more than 70 community-based health centers, a large home care agency, and one of the New York area’s largest providers of government-sponsored health insurance, MetroPlus Health Plan, the plan of choice for nearly half a million New Yorkers. Last year, HHC facilities served 1.4 million New Yorkers — including more than 475,000 uninsured.

Prior to accepting the role of President and CEO at HHC, Dr. Raju was the Chief Executive Officer for the Cook County Health & Hospitals System (CCHHS) in Chicago, Illinois, and the third largest public health system in the country. During his tenure there, Dr. Raju turned the financial status of the system around, improving the cash flow by over 100 million dollars. His proposed healthcare delivery model fetched the much coveted 1115 Waiver to the Social Security Act, enabling the creation of CountyCare, an Illinois Medicaid program to provide coverage for low-income adults in Cook County, and leading to health coverage for more than 82,000 Cook County residents.

Dr. Raju began his medical career at Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn and went on to serve as the COO and Medical Director at HHC’s Coney Island Hospital. In 2006, he became the HHC Chief Medical Officer, Corporate Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President.

Dr. Raju attended Madras Medical College to earn his medical diploma and his Master of Surgery degree. He underwent further training in England and was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. Dr. Raju is also a physician executive, having obtained an MBA from the University of Tennessee and CPE from the American College of Physician Executives. Dr. Raju is the recipient of numerous national recognitions. In 2013, he was named Business Leader of Color by Chicago United. Modern Healthcare Magazine named him one of the top 25 Minority Executives in Healthcare two times in a row, and one of the 50 most influential Physician Executives in Healthcare in 2013. Also in 2013, Becker’s Hospital Review designated him as one of 20 Hospital and Health System Leaders to Follow on Twitter.

Prof. Priyamvada Natarajan

Category: Academia

Prof Priya is a theoretical astrophysicist interested in cosmology, gravitational lensing and black hole physics. Her research involves mapping the detailed distribution of dark matter in the universe exploiting the bending of light en-route to us from distant galaxies. In particular, she has focused on making dark matter maps of clusters of galaxies, the largest known repositories of dark matter. Gravitational lensing by clusters can also be utilized to constrain dark energy models and she has been developing the methodology and techniques to do so. Her work has demonstrated that cluster strong lensing offers a unique and potentially powerful laboratory to test evolving dark energy models.

Priya is also actively engaged in deriving and understanding the mass assembly history of black holes over cosmic time. She is exploring a new channel for the formation of the first black holes and its observational consequences at high and low redshift. This channel produces massive seeds derived from the direct collapse of pre-galactic gas disks at the earliest epochs. This is in contrast to the conventional picture wherein light seeds are produced from the end state of the first stars. Current measurements of the masses of black holes hosted in nearby faint galaxies supports the existence of a massive seeding model. In earlier work, she argued for the existence of an upper limit to black hole masses in the universe by showing that black holes eventually stunt their own growth. This self-regulation implies the presence of ultra-massive black holes with capped masses in the centers of nearby galaxies that have since been observationally detected.

Priya was the chair of the Womens Faculty Forum (WFF) from 2011 – 2013 at Yale. She was on the Steering Committee of the Womens Faculty Forum from 2003-2010. She is deeply interested in Institutional Change with regard to Gender Parity in the Academy. Along with Judith Resnik and Reva Siegel at the Yale Law School, she has co-organized two Gruber conferences titled Parity as Practice: The Politics of Equality held from 30 – 31 March, 2012 and the second one titled Contesting Gender Inequalities” from 25 – 28 April, 2013 at the Law School. Priya is on the Board of the Swiss Edge Certified Foundation that works toward gender equality in the workplace.

She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the academic year (2010 – 2011), during which she was also a JILA Fellow at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a visiting professor at the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Priya was the 2009 recipient of the India Abroad Foundation’s “Face of the Future ” Award. She was also the 2009 recipient of the award for academic achievement from the Global Organization for the People of Indian Origin (GOPIO). Priya was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010. She was also elected a fellow of the Explorers Club in 2010. In January 2011 she was awarded an India Empire NRI award for Achievement in the Sciences in New Delhi, India.

Prof. Sethuraman Panchanathan

Category: Information Technology

Prof Panchanathan moved to Arizona in 1997 as a tenured associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at ASU. In 2001, he was promoted to full professor and founded the Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing (CUbiC), which is focused on designing technologies and devices for assisting individuals with disabilities. He also founded and led the School of Computing and Informatics (2006-2009) and the Department of Biomedical Informatics (2005-2007). Panchanathan was appointed as the university Chief Research Officer in 2009, where he was responsible for conceptualizing and building large interdisciplinary initiatives at ASU. In 2011, he was promoted to Senior Vice President of ASU’s Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development, for the advancement of research, entrepreneurship, innovation and economic development activities.

His research interests include Human-centered Multimedia Computing (HCMC), assistive and rehabilitative technologies, haptic user interfaces, face/gait analysis and recognition, medical image processing, media processor designs and ubiquitous computing environments for enhancing quality of life for individuals with disabilities. His research contributions have been disseminated in over 425 papers in various refereed journals and conferences. He also mentored over 100 students and scholars, which include graduate students, post-docs, research engineers and research scientists.

Dr. M. Sanjayan

Category: Science Journalism

2015. Sanjayan is an American conservation scientist, writer and Emmy-nominated television news contributor, specializing in the role of conservation in improving human well-being, wildlife and the environment. He is referred to as Sanjayan, using one name as is Tamil custom. He is executive vice president and senior scientist at Conservation International and host of the television series Earth – A New Wild, produced by National Geographic Studios in association with Passion Pictures, which began airing on PBS in February 2015. He also was featured in Grist November 19, 2014, for a story about the PBS series along with Men’s Journal and another recent story in Grist.

Prior to Conservation International, Sanjayan was lead scientist at The Nature Conservancy. His scientific work has been published in peer-reviewed journals Science, Nature and Conservation Biology and his expertise has received extensive media coverage, including Vanity Fair, Outside, Time, Men’s Journal, The New York Times and The Atlantic. His television experience includes serving as a correspondent for Years of Living Dangerously, the 2014 Emmy-nominated climate change series and hosting and contributing to television programs on The Discovery Channel and the BBC. In 2009, he appeared as a guest on Late Show with David Letterman. He also writes for The Huffington Post.

In May 2012, CBS News named Sanjayan its science and environmental contributor and his 2013 CBS Evening News report on elephant poaching was nominated for an Emmy in the investigative journalism category. National Geographic Society recently selected Sanjayan for its Explorers Council, a distinguished group of top scientists, researchers and explorers who provide advice and counsel to the Society across disciplines and projects. Sanjayan is also a Catto fellow at the Aspen Institute and a senior advisor to the Clinton Global Initiative.

Born in Sri Lanka, Sanjayan and his family moved to Sierra Leone in 1972. He moved to the United States to study at the University of Oregon, where he received both a B.S. in biology and a M.S. in ecology. In 1997, he earned a Ph. D in biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Krish Suthanthiran

Category: Business

Krishnan Suthanthiran immigrated to Canada from India in September 1969, after graduating with a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Madras, India, to pursue his Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering at Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He arrived with a total of 400 Canadian Dollars. Subsequently, he received a National Research Council of Canada Research Assistantship, and graduated with a Master’s Degree in 1971. He moved to the United States in 1972 and worked as an Engineer-Physicist at Howard University Hospital until 1978. Since then he has founded and invested globally many millions of USD in Medical, Real Estate, Construction, Entertainment, and Energy Companies.

Mr. Suthanthiran founded and is currently supporting a number of Non Profit Charitable Foundations, in promoting quality education and healthcare, and making them affordable and accessible. He is pursuing a goal of providing purified drinking water and affordable sewer systems in every part of the world. He has contributed substantially for setting up endowments for scholarships and endowed chair. He has also donated significantly to support medical research and treatment by contributing and partnering with academic centers and hospitals globally. He is the President and Founder of the Best Cure Foundation and Kitsault Energy.

Dr. Rangaswamy Srinivasan

Category: Inventions and Innovations

Rangaswamy Srinivasan is an inventor at IBM Research. One of the famous inventions he has contributed to is LASIK. President Obama awarded him the National Medal of Technology on Feb 2, 2013 for his contributions to laser eye surgery.

In 1981, Srinivasan discovered that an ultraviolet excimer laser can be used to etch a living tissue precisely without causing any thermal damage to surrounding area. He named it Ablative Photodecomposition (APD). In 1983, Srinivasan collaborated with Stephen Trokel, an ophthalmic surgeon, to use APD for a surgery of the cornea. This led to development of LASIK. In 1998, Srinivasan was awarded the Biological Physics Prize by the American Physical Society. In 2012, Srinivasan along with two other scientists, James J. Wynne and Samuel Blum, of IBM Watson were honored with National Medal of Technology and Innovation by the President of The United States Barack Obama for breakthrough in Excimer laser that enabled LASIK Surgery.

Inducted into the US “Inventor Hall of Fame” in 2002, Srinivasan has spent 30 years at IBM’s T J Watson Research Center. He received both bachelors and master’s degrees in science from the University of Madras, in 1949 and 1950.