Piyush Kumar, PhD

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.
Beyond research, Dr. Kumar is actively engaged in science policy and advocacy. He co-leads the Environmental Medicine Civic Engagement and Policy Working Group at Mount Sinai, serves as a Steering Committee member for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Section on Societal Impacts of Science and Engineering, and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Science Policy and Governance. Additionally, he contributes to multiple committees and task forces dedicated to advancing evidence-based science policy. He has been awarded membership of Global Young Academy (2025-30).