Research Chemist
The modern living has a cost, which the world is paying through its damaging potential to health and environment. We are unmindful of global warming while our climate is already changing. We are unmindful of using synthetic chemicals in industrial, agricultural, and consumer products including pharmaceuticals that are increasingly entering into our environment with disturbing population level affects. Environmental contamination is undermining the healthy development of living things through chronic exposure at low concentrations, especially by disrupting the normal functioning of endocrine system. These population level effects have potential to change human gender ratio, early puberty, reproductive disruption, and life-threatening diseases such as breast, prostate and thyroid cancer. Obesity in population is similarly attributed to these exposures. I present myself as an environmental scientist with a long tenure in green chemistry and environmental toxicology. I have worked on catalytic oxidation that closely follows enzymatic pathways to destroy both chemical and microbial toxic pollutants for abating environmental degradation. Some of this work is published in premier journals such as JACS, Angew. Chemie. and Environ. Sci. Technol. I have coauthored a comprehensive review on Human Pharmaceuticals in the Aquatic Environment in Chemical Reviews and authored a book titled Endocrine Disruptors in the Environment published by Wiley & Sons in June 2014. Previously, as an industrial scientist in the area of pest control technologies I have worked at the interface of chemistry and toxicology devising ways for enhancing efficacy and increasing potency of toxicants. These career experiences have given me an exposure to two sides of toxicology, one by minimizing or eliminating of toxicity of contaminants and other by potentiating toxicity of pest control chemicals.
