Grad student Gairik Sachdeva wins Link Fellowship

Gairik Sachdeva, a Ph.D. candidate at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been awarded a fellowship by the Link Foundation.

The award, an effort to foster education and innovation in the area of societal production and utilization of energy, provides a 2-year fellowship of $25,000 per year.

Sachdeva was recognized for his work on the synthetic metabolic control of microorganisms for biofuel production. More broadly, his research focuses on systems and synthetic biology.

Sachdeva, who is also part of the Harvard Graduate Consortium on Energy and Environment, is also interested in the economics and technology aspects of alternative fuel development and scalability. Prior to enrolling at SEAS, he earned his B.Tech in Biotechnology and Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

The Link award money will help support a project done under the guidance of his adviser, Pam Silver, who is the Elliott T. and Onie H. Adams Professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology and an Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow at Harvard. She is also a Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

Funded through an ARPA-E-funded grant to the Wyss Institute, the research focuses on developing new approaches for microbial biofuels, such as a bacterium that could use electricity to convert carbon dioxide into a chemical fuel, or a new process for capturing hydrogen.

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The Link Foundation supports programs to foster the theoretical basis, practical knowledge, and application of energy, simulation, andocean engineering and instrumentation research, and to disseminate the results of that research through lectures, seminars, and publications.

The Link Foundation is proud of its record of supporting doctoral fellowships in these areas of endeavor pursued by Edwin A. Link and also supporting educational institutions in the communities where its founders, Edwin and Marion Link, lived.Since its inception, the Link Foundation has provided more than $12 million in grants to support worthy programs consistent with its mission.