As another year comes to an end, it is indeed gratifying to look back at the many accomplishments of IUSSTF in 2018! IUSSTF celebrated its 18th Anniversary earlier this year in the presence of Dr. Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister for Science & Technology, Environment, Forest and Climate Change and Earth Sciences, Govt. of India and Mr. Kenneth Juster, Ambassador of the United States to India. In the course of our 18-year journey, IUSSTF has developed a vibrant program portfolio largely conceived and driven by the scientific and entrepreneurial community from both countries. We can emphatically say that we have been able to fulfil our mandate to promote cooperation between the two great nations and seamlessly bring together the diverse engagements in the U.S.-India collaborative arena in science, technology and innovation to fruition.

Water and Air Quality Monitoring are more important now than it has ever been in the past. In order to deal with this immensely complex challenge in an efficient and effective manner, the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India (DST) and Intel® have collaborated to initiate a research program titled “Research Initiative for Real-time River Water and Air Quality Monitoring”. The overall objective is to develop tools and constituent blocks that will enable end-to-end water and air quality monitoring systems on smart, networked, low-cost, low-power sensor nodes with large-scale cloud-based data analysis. The program is implemented by IUSSTF and in this issue, we cover the progress of two projects in the water quality monitoring space.

Our program in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship space is growing steadily and we are currently in the process of wrapping up the 9th Call that received an overwhelming response from our stakeholders. In this edition of Connect, we cover two of USISTEF’s most recent awardees.

Looking ahead, we see an ocean of possibilities for IUSSTF to grow and become increasingly relevant and valuable to the very fabric that binds the scientific enterprises of India and the United States together. On behalf of the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum, I wish all our readers an inspired and productive New Year!