Biologist Sathyabhama Das Biju, who is popularly known as ‘the Frogman of India’, has been chosen for Harvard University’s prestigious Radcliffe fellowship.
The Delhi University professor is one of the 50 scholars who were awarded the Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship for 2023-24.
Prof. Biju has attracted global attention to amphibians in South Asia through his work spanning three decades during which he discovered over a hundred species.
As a Hardy Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (or Harvard Radcliffe Institute) at Harvard University, he will “expedite efforts to outpace nameless extinctions in India’s amphibian hotspots through discovery and documentation of species and identification of key biodiversity areas for conservation prioritisation”, a press release stated.
Prof. Biju’s work will involve on-site collaborations with Harvard faculty, postdocs and students, and the use of rich specimen collections of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.
The Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program brings together a range of scholars and practitioners in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and arts, as well as writers, journalists, and others to pursue their work in a highly concentrated fashion, using all the intellectual and research resources of the vibrant interdisciplinary Harvard-Radcliffe community. Prof. Biju is the 60th fellow representing Biological Sciences in 23 years of the programme and only the second fellow in the discipline from India.
He had recently won the Kerala Sree award instituted by the Kerala government for his outstanding contributions in the field of science.
