Go Green for Environmental Sustainability

Xavier Savarimuthu, S.J., was a Vice-Principal and Head of the Department of Environmental Studies at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata. He has extensively presented and published papers on his work on arsenic pollution both in India and abroad. His latest article was published in four different languages, namely, French, Spanish, Latin, and English. He has delivered invited lectures in Stockholm, Sweden; Manila, Philippines;, Paris, France; Bonn, Germany; and at the University of Oxford. He has taught at Santa Clara University, California, and Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, where he held the endowed MacLean Jesuit Chair. He has ignited many young minds in the field of environmental education, creating a new generation of ecologically conscious citizens. Usha Rao is an Associate Professor of environmental geochemistry at Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia. She obtained her undergraduate degree in geology from St. Xavier’s College, Bombay, and her Ph.D. in geochemistry from the University of Rochester, prior to completing Environmental Research Council funded post-doctoral work in Geological Sciences and Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University. At Saint Joseph’s University where she has taught for over twenty years, she is the Founding Director of the Office of Teaching and Learning, and the co-founder of a mentoring program for gifted STEM students. Her research on environmental pollution has been widely published and supported by grants from the American Chemical Society, the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. She serves as an ad hoc reviewer for the National Science Foundation and leading international publications. She is a Climate Reality Fellow, certified by Vice President Al Gore’s foundation of the same name, and serves as a scientific consultant to corporations and intergovernmental organizations, and as a board trustee of several non-profit organizations. Mark Reynolds, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. He received his B.A. in chemistry from Grinnell College as a Charles White Scholar, and his Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a National Science Foundation Biophysics Fellow. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota. At Saint Joseph’s University, he currently serves as the Director of Saint Joseph's University's office of competitive fellowships. His research focuses on the role of heme-based gas sensing proteins which sense NO, CO, and O2, and play a crucial regulatory role in a wide variety of organisms. His research has been published in international scientific journals including Nature, the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, and Biochemistry, and was profiled in Chemical and Engineering News. Dr. Reynolds’ research has been funded by the American Chemical Society - Petroleum Research Fund, Research Corporation, Merck, Inc., the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.