Prosanta Chakrabarty | Inside the NSF and Beyond

Decolonizing ScienceScience Funding
Written By David Lang

Bio: Dr. Prosanta Chakrabarty is a Professor and the Curator of Fishes at the Museum of Natural Science and Department of Biological Sciences at Louisiana State University. He is also a Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C and the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, Canada. He is a systematist and an ichthyologist studying the evolution and biogeography of both freshwater and marine fishes, his work has taken him to more than thirty countries around the world (including Japan, Australia, Brazil, Taiwan, Madagascar, Panama, and Kuwait). He has described over a dozen new species and published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers and several books. He grew up in New York City, his undergraduate degree is from McGill University in Montreal (the city where he was born) and his PhD is from the University of Michigan. He is a former Program Director at he National Science Foundation, an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a TED Senior Fellow. He is currently (2020-2021) a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Environmental Science at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Links: website | twitter

Summary: Dr. Prosanta Chakrabarty starts with a niche and goes wide. His specialty is cave fishes, which he deftly connects to bigger ideas about evolution and deep time. We talked about his experience as a Program Officer with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and his current focus of building better scientific infrastructure around the world.

David Lang
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