Piyush Kumar

Biography

Dr. Piyush Kumar is an Instructor in the Department of Environmental Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. He is a biophotonics researcher and science policy advocate, with expertise in biospectroscopy, exposomics, environmental health, and cancer biology.
Dr. Kumar earned his Ph.D. from Tata Memorial Centre’s ACTREC (Navi Mumbai, India), where he specialized in cancer biology, early-stage biomarkers, and optical spectroscopic techniques—particularly Raman spectroscopy, a non-destructive, label-free diagnostic tool with promising in vivo applications. His postdoctoral research at Mount Sinai’s Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health focused on chemical imaging of human samples to investigate long-term environmental exposures and identify biomarkers for early disease detection, including during the prenatal and fetal stages.

On the science policy and advocacy front, Piyush is an Associate Editor of Journal of Science Policy and Governance and a Steering Committee Leader of Section-X (Societal Impacts of Science and Engineering) of the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS). Piyush has been in several committees and taskforce related to postdoctoral reforms, barriers to STEM education and science policy discussions.

Awards