- Lived:
- b. 3 November 1962, Shimla — a railway childhood across small-town India; the work happened in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, at the Christian Medical College, with chapters in Houston, Faridabad and, as of September 2026, the Gates Foundation in Seattle
- Field:
- virology and public health — the gut infections of children; birth-cohort science; vaccine trials
- The Big Idea:
- You cannot fix what you have not counted. She followed newborns for years at a time, testing every stool sample, until the counting explained why Indian children's guts fail, why the same oral vaccine protects less in Vellore than in Ohio — and how to prove that a rotavirus vaccine costing about a dollar actually works.
- In their words:
- she has spent her career, she likes to say, on an "unglamorous" disease — childhood diarrhoea — because that is where the children were dying (as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- In 2019 the Royal Society elected the first Indian woman Fellow in its 359-year history — and the work that got her there was three decades of patiently counting the infections of poor children in Vellore, until the counting became a vaccine India could afford to give every baby it has.