Kuno Award Alumna

2024 Kuno Award Winner

Dr. Meha Jain

Meha Jain is an Associate Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Her research examines the impacts of environmental change on agricultural production, and how farmers may adapt to reduce negative impacts. She also examines ways that we can sustainably enhance agricultural production in the face of environmental change. To do this work, she combines remote sensing and geospatial analyses with household-level and census datasets to examine farmer decision-making and agricultural production across large spatial and temporal scales. She has a B.A. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University, a Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology from Columbia University, and postdoctoral experience in the Department of Earth System Science from Stanford University.

2022

2022 Kuno Award Winner

Dr. Srija Chakraborty & Dr. Eleanor Stokes

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Dr. Srija Chakraborty is an Associate Scientist at the Earth from Space Institute (EfSI), USRA and specializes in applied machine learning for analyzing remote sensing observations. At EfSI, she focuses on tailoring these capabilities for remotely sensed Earth Observation data, especially for NASA’s Black Marble Product Suite. These have applications in assisting near-real time disaster mitigation efforts and long-term studies for monitoring global environmental change. She has also served on the NASA Science Mission Directorate Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning Working Group for Earth Science since 2020 and has been a technical co-lead in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society’s Image Analysis and Data Fusion working group.

Prior to joining EfSI, USRA, she was a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at Goddard Space Flight Center with the Black Marble Science Team and developed machine learning approaches for nighttime remote sensing. She received a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Arizona State University in 2019, studying machine learning and statistical signal processing algorithms for analyzing remotely sensed Earth and Planetary observations.

Dr. Eleanor Stokes is a scientist at the Earth from Space Institute (EfSI), housed at Universities Space Research Association. Stokes oversees a broad portfolio of fundamental natural and social science research activities at EfSI aimed at understanding the complex human and environmental interactions that shape our world. She also co-leads mission concept development and scientific research activities for Black Marble, NASA’s Earth at Night satellite mission. Prior to joining USRA, Stokes was awarded a NASA Jenkins fellowship, and was a pioneer user of Suomi-NPP VIIRS Day/Night Band data, refining the early processing algorithms and developing novel methods for tracking changes in our Human Planet from urbanization, infrastructure development, disasters, and conflicts. In 2020, she was chosen as one of ESRI’s “Women Stars of Spatial Science” and in 2021 one of GeoSpatial World 50 Rising Stars. She received a PhD degree from Yale’s School of the Environment, a MS in mechanical engineering from MIT, and a BA from Dartmouth College.

2020

2020 Kuno Award Winner

Dr. Tamar Krishnamurti

Tamar Krishnamurti, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Pittsburgh, with an adjunct position at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Krishnamurti draws on (and develops) methods in the social and decision sciences, working with cross-disciplinary experts and community, to examine issues at the intersection of health, risk, technology, and the environment. Dr. Krishnamurti was the recipient of S&R Evermay’s 2020 Kuno Award for Applied Science to develop mobile health strategies to identify and intervene on maternal health risks. She is a co-founder of the FemTech Collaborative, housed within the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Innovative Research on Gender Health Equity.

2018

2018 Kuno Award Winner

Dr. Mary Armanios

Dr. Mary Armanios is Professor of Oncology and Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her research interests have focused on understanding the role of telomeres and telomerase in disease. She discovered a causal link between short telomeres and a lung disease that causes lung scarring known as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. She and her team have defined mechanisms of telomere-mediated disease and their implications for clinical practice.

Dr. Armanios earned her medical degree at the Ohio State University, where she went on to complete a combined internal medicine and pediatrics residency. She completed her oncology training and post-doctoral work at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She is currently the Clinical Director of the Telomere Center at Johns Hopkins where she also oversees the telomere diagnostics lab which serves patients and physicians from around the world.

2017

2017 Kuno Award Winner

Dr. Abigail Marsh

Abigail Marsh is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience at Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and conducted her post-doctoral research at the National Institute of Mental Health.

Her research is aimed at answering the questions: How do we understand what others think and feel? What drives us to help other people? What prevents us from harming them? Her research on these topics uses functional and structural brain imaging, as well as behavioral, cognitive, genetic, and pharmacological techniques and comprises over 90 publications in journals that include Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, American Journal of Psychiatry, and JAMA Psychiatry. She has also written an award-winning trade book about her research called THE FEAR FACTOR (2017, Hachette) and has authored articles for The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Her research has received awards that include the Cozzarelli Prize for scientific excellence and originality from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The S&R Kuno Award for Applied Science for the Social Good, and the Richard J. Wyatt Fellowship award for translational research from the NIMH. She serves on the advisory boards of the National Kidney Donation Organization and 1Day Sooner, and is the co-founder of Psychopathy Is. She served as President of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society from 2019-2021.

2015

2015 Kuno Award Winner

Dr. Sheila Ohlsson Walker

Sheila Ohlsson Walker’s research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Arizona State University focuses on how information from the fields of neurobiology, genetics, epigenetics, and endocrinology can be applied to enhance educational outcomes, promote healthy behavior, reduce rates of chronic disease, and optimize health and learning throughout life. Dr. Walker is currently exploring the biological embedding of chronic stress and how environmental factors can significantly enhance or degrade health and academic performance, with an emphasis on high-poverty educational and family contexts.