Award-winning work

Seattle Times staff, 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting, awarded for its comprehensive coverage, in print and online, of the shooting deaths of four police officers in a coffee house and the 40-hour manhunt for the suspect. I contributed tweets, raw video and reporting to the staff's winning entry.

 

Second place, Arts/Entertainment/Lifestyle, Online adaptation of print story, 2009 Northwest Excellence in Journalism Awards, Society of Professional Journalists. The award was presented for two stories published in The Seattle Times: "Christmas trees: Only 15 chopping days left," and "Cadillac of worms rules as an urban composter."

 

"Decades of effort fail to close gap in student achievement," Seattle Times, A1, May 9, 2004. First place, Online Special Report, 2005 Northwest Excellence in Journalism Awards, Society of Professional Journalists.

 

"Anthrax: Ground Zero," series of stories in The Palm Beach Post. As The Post's medical reporter, Sanjay Bhatt led the staff's award-winning coverage of the nation's first confirmed anthrax case in the bioterrorist attack. The awards:

Honors

Ranked #39 in the "Top 50 Coolest Desis of 2009" by DesiClub.com, a global web portal for the South Asian diaspora.

 

AAJA-Knowledge @ Wharton Awards for Business Journalism, 2009. Sponsored by the South Asian Journalists Association, the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania and the Knowledge@Wharton online business journal, the award covers tuition for the prestigious Wharton Seminars at the university.

 

Chapter of the Year, 2008. At its 2008 national convention in Chicago, The Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) honored the Seattle chapter for its successful campaign to establish a $100,000 scholarship endowment for the Northwest Journalists of Color. Read all about it.

 

Knight Multimedia Fellow, University of California-Berkeley, May 2008. One of 20 mid-career journalists chosen for a competitive week-long multimedia workshop.

 

Outstanding Service Award, Association of Health Care Journalists, 2006. The leading professional society for journalists covering health and health care recognized me for four years of service and leading major changes across the organization, including fiscal accountability, a new executive director and securing commitments from major funders for a national conference in Houston.

 

Executive Leadership Program, Asian American Journalists Association, 2006. Selected for a competitive one-week training program for mid-career journalists.

 

Speaker, exPRESSion media conference, Convergence Institute of Media, Management & Information Technology Studies, 2005. For about an hour, I spoke to about 400 student and professional journalists in Bangalore about my experiences working in U.S. media and answered questions.

 

Knight Journalism Fellow, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2002. One of six journalists chosen for a four-month fellowship in public health. The fellowship included a one-month stint in Portland at the Oregon Department of Public Health.

 

Recognized for leadership

In July 2008, I accepted the Chapter of the Year Award from the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA). The award recognizes the brilliant work of our Seattle chapter, which in 2007 reached its goal of raising $100,000 for an endowment for the Northwest Journalists of Color scholarship program. The endowment drive began in 2004.

I co-chaired the NJC endowment campaigns in 2006 and 2007, and in the final year we raised a record-setting $45,000. Our success would not have been possible without the dedication of our volunteers and the generosity of our donors.

Since 1986, AAJA Seattle has awarded NJC scholarships to more than 100 promising minority journalism students, many of whom have gone on to bright careers in the industry.

Modeling the Seattle chapter's focus on individual donations, AAJA has launched its "Power of One" campaign to create a $2 million endowment.

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