Gagandeep Kang

Gagandeep Kang grew up moving around north and east India, changing schools 10 times. She practiced science frequently at home during her childhood, building a lab with her father at home when she was 12 and experimenting by cutting up leaves then observing them through a microscope.[7]

Gagandeep Kang completed her Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) in 1987 and her Doctor of Medicine (MD) in Microbiology in 1991 from Christian Medical College, Vellore and obtained her PhD in 1998.[3] She 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.

Kang is a medical scientist who has worked on diarrhoea diseases and public health in India since the early 1990s. She is a key contributor to rotavirus epidemiology and vaccinology in India. Focusing on vaccines, enteric infections and nutrition in young children in disadvantaged communities, she has combined field epidemiology with intensive laboratory investigations to inform both the science of infectious diseases and policy in India. Her comprehensive research on rotavirus has demonstrated the high burden of rotavirus disease across India, the genetic diversity of viruses, the lower protection from infection and vaccines and the exploration of several approaches to improve the performance of oral vaccines. Her work has led to her being described as India's "vaccine godmother".[7]

She has published over 300 scientific papers and is on editorial boards for several journals, including PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, Current Opinion in Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine and International Health. She 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. She chairs the WHO SEAR's Regional Immunisation Technical Advisory Group (2015–present). She 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.[8]

Kang played a significant role in the efforts that culminated in the development of Rotavac, a vaccine from Bharat Biotech International that targets diarrhea. She was one of three principal investigators in the Phase III clinical trials of the vaccine.[9] Her initial interest was in identifying the correlates of protection against the rotavirus. She and others began by recreating a study conducted in Mexico to identify children protected from rotaviral infection, research the immune responses and isolate the correlate of protection. The recreated study itself did not succeed, but it did develop high quality laboratory methods for the detection of rotaviruses. Kang and one of her students subsequently established vaccine assays for rotavirus infections, used in testing Rotavac.[10]