Tripura girl selected for Schmidt Science Prog fellowship in USA
Susmita Sarkar, a native of Tripura, is selected as one of the Fellows of Schmidt Science Program.(https://schmidtsciencefellows.org/news/eric-and-wendy-schmidt-announce-2023-cohort/).
She is one of the first few Indians to get this award and definitely the first from Tripura.
Schmidt Science Fellows program is one of the most prestigious fellowships in the world. It is headed by Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google.
The winners will get $100,000/year to pursue a research topic of their interest anywhere in the world. Schmidt Science program (https://schmidtsciencefellows.org/overview/) is very competitive because they select only a few people (32), across the world, across all fields in Science and Engineering.
Only Indian university represented in the list this year is the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). As a Schmidt Science Fellow, Susmita will pursue research on wearable devices for applications in healthcare.
This news is highlighted in many international news outlets. According to Forbes, this Fellowship is “Considered one of the most prestigious scientific postdoctoral awards in the world”,
She studies at Purdue University, which is a 153-year-old university in the USA, and she is the first Purdue student ever to win this fellowship from Purdue University.
About Susmita Sarkar:
Susmita Sarkar was born in Sabroom, South Tripura in 1993. She studied in Sabroom Girls H.S. School and passed Madhyamik in 2009. She then studied in Netaji Subhas Vidya Niketan in Agartala in class 11 and 12. She received her B.Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering in 2015, from the National Institute of Technology, Agartala. She then came to the USA in 2015 to pursue an her Master’s degree.
She opted for Mechanical Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, USA, where she worked on lithium-ion batteries. She then moved to Purdue University, West Lafayette, for her Ph.D research, which is based on sodium-ion batteries. She made many significant breakthroughs in her field, publishing in the most prestigious journals of the world, like Nature Materials. She was selected as a ‘Rising Star in Mechanical Engineering’ by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the no. 1 university in the world) in 2021.
Along with Schmidt Science Fellwship, Susmita won a lot of awards. She is one of the recipients of 2023 CAS Future leaders, where they select only a few topmost early career scientists, around the world.
She was a recipient of multiple research and leadership awards including Bilsland Fellowship 2022, Ben M. Hillberry Graduate Scholarship 2022, Hommert Engineering Excellence Fellowship 2021, IEEE Outstanding Graduate Student Member Award, 2021, College of Engineering Outstanding Service Award 2021, etc.
