[caption id="attachment_334" align="alignleft" width="474"]
Abhinav Mishra[/caption]
Abhinav Mishra has been awarded the Kulkarni Summer Research Fellowship. The Kulkarni Fellowship provides research support enabling University of Maryland Graduate School doctoral students who are Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) alumni to make significant progress toward degree completion. The Kulkarni Summer Research Fellowships provide support to outstanding University of Maryland doctoral students at “mid‐career” (the period approximately before, during, or after achievement of candidacy). The fellowships provide doctoral students the opportunity to concentrate fully on their own scholarly activities and research, for the duration of a summer, at a critical moment in their graduate studies. Abhinav was awarded the fellowship for his proposed research on "Analyzing a Pre-harvest System Model to Understand the Ecology of E. coli O157:H7 in Leafy Greens Production".
Abhinav is pursuing a Ph.D. in Food Safety and Predicative Microbiology. His research topic is "Development and Application of Predictive Models for Survival, Growth, and Death of Enteric Pathogens in Leafy Greens Supply Chain". Dr. Abani Pradhan, Assistant Professor in the Nutrition and Food Science Department as well as a faculty member of the Center of Food Safety and Security Systems (CFS3), is his advisor. Abhinav had this to say regarding the fellowship award "During the past decade, we have begun to see a new “systems” food safety vocabulary emerging as a result of the need to deal with highly complex food safety issues. Systems thinking is an approach to problem-solving based on the belief that the component parts of a system can best be understood in the context of relationships with each other and with other systems, rather than in isolation. I am very grateful that this Fellowship will provide me a chance to learn more about the systems approach."