THE POWER OF 100: SCIENCE & MEDICINE

ACHIEVERS ACROSS THE DOMAINS OF POLITICS, BUSINESS, SCIENCE, THE ARTS, ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS, EDUCATION, LAW AND DEFENCE WHO ARE SHOWING US WHAT WOMEN'S EMPOWERMENT LOOKS LIKE

- Ajay Sukumaran, Amarnath K. Menon, Sonali Acharjee, Jumana Shah

SHOOTING FOR THE STARS 

Annapurni Subramaniam, 55 Director, Indian Institute of Astrophysics

AS A CHILD, ANNAPURNI SUBRAMANIAM would settle down to study for a couple of hours before dawn—the coolest time during the Palakkad summer. That was when she first got curious about the night sky. “I used to see the Milky Way every morning. I didn’t know what it was...it was a cloud patch in the same part of the sky every morning. That’s not possible, right? So, I knew it was not atmospheric. But there was nobody you could discuss this with,” she says.

ACCOMPLISHMENT

Annapurni Subramaniam, who in 2019 became the first woman director of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, has broken gender barriers every step of the way in a field that has long been dominated by men

Looking for a career in research after her master’s degree in Physics, Annapurni was always clear that she wanted to take up ‘anything to do with the sky’. That led her to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), where she opted for an astronomy programme conducted jointly with the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), ISRO and the Raman Research Institute. The IIA later offered her a position as a research fellow in 1990, and nearly three decades after that, in 2019, Annapurni became the first woman to head the institute. The IIA is India’s coordination centre for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project, a global partnership between the US, Canada, Japan, China and India.