Dr Gagandeep Kang is a renowned microbiologist and virologist. Currently, she is Currently, She is Director, Enterics, Diagnostics, Genomics and Epidemiology, Global Health at Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Previously she was a Professor of Microbiology in the Department of Gastrointestinal Sciences at the Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore. She has also directed CMC’s Wellcome Trust Research Laboratory and was formerly the Executive Director of the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI), an autonomous institute of the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India.
Over two decades, Dr Kang has built a strong interdisciplinary research programme that has conducted key studies to understand enteric infectious diseases in impoverished communities. Working in partnership with the government as well as non-governmental organisations, she has carried out studies of rotaviral vaccines, built national rotavirus and typhoid surveillance networks, and provided laboratory support for the development indigenous vaccines for rotavirus and typhoid, for use in low- and middle-income countries.
Dr Kang has also served on numerous national and international editorial boards, research grant review boards and scientific advisory committees. She has been a member of the WHO’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety and the Immunization and Vaccine Implementation Research Advisory Committee, as well as the chair of the Immunization Technical Advisory Group for the WHO’s South East Asian Region. At CMC, she has also established training programmes for students and young faculty in clinical translational medicine.
For her ground-breaking work, Dr Kang has received national and international recognition. In 2019, she became the first Indian woman to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in London. She previously became the only physician-scientist to receive the Infosys Prize in Life Sciences in 2016, and also won the Young National Woman Bioscientist Award in 2006. Dr Kang holds M.B.B.S., M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from CMC and did her Postdoctoral Research from the Baylor College of Medicine. She is an elected Fellow of all the Indian academies of science, the American Academy of Microbiology, The Royal College of Pathologists and the Faculty of Public Health in the UK.
