While Mayor Dannel Malloy will receive the Friend of GOPIO honor, Dr Natarajan, associate professor in the Department of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University, will be honored with the Indian-American Achiever Award,
and Dr Kapur, director of music technology at California Institute of the Arts and professor of sonic arts at the New Zealand School of Music, will be presented the Young Person of the Year Award.
The awardees have enriched our lives and the community we live in with their dedication, contributions and the passion for what they do and have accomplished," according to Sangeeta Ahuja, the chapter's president. Natarajan will be presented the Indian-American Achiever Award for her accomplishment and contributions to astro-physics and her research on black holes. She is a Radcliffe fellow and had her undergraduate education at MIT and was a
graduate student there in the Program in Science, Technology and Society section. She received her PhD from the University of
Cambridge (England) in theoretical astrophysics, where she was on an Isaac Newton studentship. A fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale and the Royal Astronomical Society, she serves on the science advisory board
of NOVA (WGBH) television program.
Dr Kapur, who founded his multimedia consulting company, KarmetiK, which designs custom technology solutions for the entertainment industry, received an interdisciplinary PhD from University of Victoria, combining computer science, electrical and mechanical engineering, music and psychology with focus on intelligent music and media technology. He had his earlier degrees from Princeton University. He has been developing new interfaces for musical expression.
Mayor Malloy is the longest serving mayor in Stamford and under his administration, the city has seen vast reductions in crime, new affordable housing, transformative economic development and many improvements to an educational system that competes with the nation's most prestigious public schools,² the chapter noted.
