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Dr Rajani Panchang, a UGC assistant professor at the Department of Environmental Science of Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU), has been awarded the Fulbright-Kalam Climate Fellowship for Academic and Professional Excellence 2025, the university said in a media release on Wednesday.
During her fellowship, Dr Panchang will work with Professor Pamela Hallock, a scientist, and be hosted by Dr Michael Martinez-Colon at Florida A&M in Tallahassee, Florida, for nine months starting mid-November 2025. Dr Panchang will quantify 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 are shelled organisms 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.
The university said that Dr Panchang 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 members and researchers to conduct climate-related research in the US for eight to 12 months. This programme was launched in September 2014 to build long-term capacity to address climate change-related issues in both countries. It is administered by the United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF) on behalf of both governments.
Dr Panchang is the only earth scientist and one of the four researchers in the country to have been awarded in this category this year. She earned her PhD from the CSIR–National Institute of Oceanography, Panaji, Goa, in 2008 and has served as a scientist at the 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 and research fellowships from German Academic Exchange (DAAD), CSIR (2006), Lila Poonawalla Foundation (2000), and Hindustan Unilever (2004). She was felicitated in 2005 by then President Dr A P J Abdul Kalam for being an outstanding Lila fellow in oceanography.
