Eminent Scientists From India Among 2019 Royal Society Fellows

Virologist Dr. Gagandeep Kang and pharmaceutical company Cipla chairperson Dr. Yusuf Hamied are among this year’s roster of Royal Society Fellows.

AsianScientist (Apr. 23, 2019) – Two eminent scientists from India were among the 51 researchers elected as Fellows of the Royal Society. They are Dr. Gagandeep Kang, executive director of the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute, India, and the current chair of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Southeast-Asia region’s immunization technical advisory group; and Dr. Yusuf Hamied, chairman, Cipla, a leading pharmaceutical company established in India in 1935.

Kang is a decorated virologist and the first Indian woman scientist to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. She is known for her interdisciplinary research studying the transmission, development and prevention of enteric infections and their sequelae among children in India.

To develop practical approaches supporting public health, she built national rotavirus and typhoid surveillance networks, as well as established laboratories to support vaccine trials, a comprehensive approach that has resulted in two WHO pre-qualified vaccines. Kang continues to investigate the complex relationships between infection, gut function and physical and cognitive development. She seeks to build a stronger human immunology research base in India.

The other eminent scientist from India among the 2019 cohort of Fellows is 82-year-old Hamied. He graduated with honors from Cambridge University, UK, in 1957 and studied for his PhD under the Nobel laureate Alexander Todd. Over the past six decades, Hamied has been instrumental in the growth, development, implementation and adaption of science in the indigenous pharma industry in India. His company has commercially synthesized many essential drugs by developing patent non-infringing processes in diverse drug classes, including steroids, antibiotics, HIV/AIDS, respiratory and oncology drugs.

“Over the course of the Royal Society’s vast history, it is our Fellowship that has remained a constant thread and the substance from which our purpose has been realized: to use science for the benefit of humanity,” said Professor Venki Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society.

“This year’s newly elected Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society embody this, being drawn from diverse fields of enquiry—epidemiology, geometry, climatology—at once disparate, but also aligned in their pursuit and contributions of knowledge about the world in which we live, and it is with great honor that I welcome them as Fellows of the Royal Society,” he added.


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Source: The Royal Society.
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