Indian American professor receives 2018 Vizzies People’s Choice Award

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Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, an Indian American professor at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, was one of the two individuals who was selected by the National Science Foundation for its 2018 Vizzies People’s Choice award for photography.

Along with Bhullar, graduate student Daniel Smith, an assistant professor and assistant curator in geology and geophysics, was also named among the recipients.

According to a university press release, both of their winning image show a Madagascar ground gecko embryo after 12 days of incubation in the egg, where areas in red (muscles) and grey (nerves), indicate how much development of these structures has taken place in such a short time.

The image was taken by an LSM880 confocal microscope and is made up of 12,000 individual images.

The award comes with a cash prize of $500 and the winning image will be featured on both the NSF’s website and on PopSci.com, the press release adds.

According to his bio on the university’s website, at Yale, Bhullar’s group focuses on great transitions in the history of vertebrates both in the field and in the lab by using the geological record of life to guide questions about major transformations across vertebrata, especially at the origins of extant radiations such as birds, mammals, tetrapods and gnathostomes.

To address the nature and mechanism of pivotal events at crucial points in evolutionary history, Bhullar’s lab brings to bear a full range of modern biological and geological techniques, especially molecular developmental biology and functional biology, coupled with advanced three-dimensional imaging and geometric analysis, however, they maintain a surpassing commitment to the discovery of new fossils in the field, Bhullar mentions in his bio.

The Vizzies is sponsored by NSF and Popular Science magazine, and it honors scientific visualizations that help create a universal language enabling people around the world to better understand scientific ideas and phenomena, a press release said.