HOUSTON: An Indian-American scholar has won the prestigious 'Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award' which includes a grant to study the causes behind dinosaur extinction.

Sankar Chatterjee, a professor of paleontology and curator at the Museum of Texas University, will travel in the spring of 2015 to India to continue his ongoing research on his Shiva crater hypothesis, which, along with the Chicxulub crater of Mexico, has been linked to the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

"The Shiva crater is about 500 kilometers in diameter, and we discovered it from geophysical evidence and drill core samples in the Mumbai offshore basin on the western continental shelf of India," Chatterjee said in a statement.

"The crater is largely submerged and buried by a 2 to 7-kilometer thick strata and is the largest oil field in India.

"I have been invited to participate in the Koyna Drilling Project to study the core samples that may unravel the genesis of the Shiva crater," Chatterjee said.

Grants were also awarded to about 800 other U.S. faculty members, according to the statement, who are conducting their research in 140 countries.

The recipients, according to the release, are chosen based on their academic and professional achievements as well as leadership potential in their fields.

The programme was established in 1946 and has provided more than 1,08,000 Americans and 1,78,000 scholars and teachers from other countries that have come to the U.S., the opportunity to travel and study other country's political, economic, educational and cultural institutions.

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