Gagandeep Kang was awarded the prestigious Infosys Prize in Life Sciences in 2016 for her contributions to understanding the natural history of rotavirus and other infectious diseases.
22 Facts About Gagandeep Kang
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Gagandeep Kang was on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2020.
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Gagandeep Kang is co-author of book Till We Win: India's Fight Against The COVID-19 Pandemic, with Chandrakant Lahariya, a leading Indian medical doctor and Public policy and health system expert and Randeep Guleria, the director of AIIMS, New Delhi.
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Gagandeep Kang was born in Shimla on 3 November 1962.
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Gagandeep Kang's mother taught English and history and her father was a mechanical engineer in the Indian Railways.
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Gagandeep Kang grew up moving around north and east India, changing schools 10 times.
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Gagandeep Kang practiced science frequently at home during her childhood, building a lab with her father at home when she was 12 and experimenting in biology, physics and chemistry.
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Gagandeep Kang completed her Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery in 1987 and her Doctor of Medicine in Microbiology in 1991 from Christian Medical College, Vellore and obtained her PhD in 1998.
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Gagandeep Kang obtained her membership of the Royal College of Pathologists and carried out postdoctoral research with Mary K Estes at the Baylor College of Medicine, Houston before returning to the Christian Medical College.
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Gagandeep Kang is a medical scientist who has worked on diarrhea diseases and public health in India since the early 1990s.
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Gagandeep Kang is a key contributor to rotavirus epidemiology and vaccinology in India.
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Gagandeep Kang's work has led to her being described as India's "vaccine godmother".
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Gagandeep Kang has published over 300 scientific papers and is or was on editorial boards for several journals, including PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, Current Opinion in Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine and International Health.
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Gagandeep Kang is on many review committees for national and international research funding agencies, and has served on several advisory committees mainly related to vaccines, including India's National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation, the WHO's Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety and the Immunisation and Vaccine Implementation Research Advisory Committee.
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Gagandeep Kang has received honorary appointments as an associate faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland and adjunct professor at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts.
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Gagandeep Kang played a significant role in the efforts that culminated in the development of Rotavac, a vaccine from Bharat Biotech that targets diarrhea.
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Gagandeep Kang was one of three principal investigators in the Phase III clinical trials of the vaccine.
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Since 2020, Gagandeep Kang has been an ex-officio member of a working group on COVID-19 vaccines established by the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts at the WHO.
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Gagandeep Kang was involved in India's drive to produce a coronavirus vaccine.
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Gagandeep Kang is the second Indian woman scientist to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 359 years of history of this scientific academy.
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Gagandeep Kang was the ninth woman to be awarded the Infosys Prize.
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Gagandeep Kang is the first Indian and the first woman to edit Manson's Textbook of Tropical Medicine.