New Delhi: Gagandeep Kang has resigned from her executive director’s position at the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI), Faridabad, The Hindu has reported.
The Faridabad institute functions under the Department of Biotechnology of the Union Ministry of Science and Technology. It is an autonomous body where Kang had another year left as director.
A scholar of extraordinary mettle, Kang is known for her inter-disciplinary research in the transmission, development and prevention of enteric infections and their sequelae in children in India.
Her expertise comes in particular focus at a time of health crisis, as Kang is also vice-chairperson at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness, a global consortium involved with facilitating vaccine candidates for COVID-19.
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Kang had also been heading ICMR’s recently disbanded expert panel that had been constituted to look into new COVID-19 drugs and vaccines. A Wire Science article by Priyanka Pulla noted that the group’s “members are not sure why it was broken up. Some of them told the newspaper [The Hindu] that the panel’s objectives hadn’t been met.”
Kang’s achievements are many. She is the first Indian woman to have been elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London. Her research was instrumental in the development of Rotavac, the first vaccine to be made from scratch in India.
Her studies have contributed to the understanding of diarrhoeal diseases, rotavirus epidemiology and vaccinology.
In 2016, when the medical researcher won the Infosys Prize in life sciences, T.V. Padma wrote on The Wire, “Kang has been working on rotavirus epidemiology: determining how many cases are added each year, its patterns of spread and distribution, and possible control of the infection. She has also been working on the rotavirus vaccine since the early 1990s.”
“Some pioneering work includes the largest study that tracked new born babies for infection, with which she was able to show that protection after infection is lower among Indian infants than among infants in the west. Another study investigated the efficacy of a monovalent rotavirus vaccine in Indian settings.”