Ovik Banerjee 1989-2014

I regret sharing the devastating news that Ovik Banerjee passed away last Monday.  He was only 24.

Ovik worked in our lab in 2011. He and Amanda and Juan de spent the summer that year in Muisne Ecuador, working on a mangrove restoration – blue carbon project (DelVecchia et al. 2013).  This is what Ovik said about that summer:

During the summer of 2011 I was a field researcher in Ecuador studying Carbon Sequestration in Mangrove Forests. There were times where I spent days at a time on an island with only five permanent human residents, no electricity or running water, and countless mosquitoes. Despite the hard work (12 hour days), it was one of the best summers of my life.

I ran into Ovik last summer in Providence RI at Water Fire, and he was as happy and friendly and outgoing as ever.  That was the last time I saw him.  On Facebook as in person Ovik was passionate about issues like the environment and social justice.

I thought the best way to commemorate him here was to share some of the images of him working in Ecuador in lots of mud with good friends. In the bottom image, he is helping extract soil cores from a restored mangrove forest, so that soil carbon and carbon sequestration could be measured.