In her element

She just became the first woman to head an IIT. Aghalayam, 49, is excited about reaching out to the world, at the first overseas campus, in Zanzibar. We need women in STEM, we need diversity in research, we need young people to feel they can chase their dreams here, she says

- Sukanya Datta

Her childhood home was a laboratory, she says, laughing.

Preeti Aghalayam grew up in Mysuru, Karnataka, daughter of two academics, a chemistry the professor and a linguistics scholar. She dismantled clocks and toy cars in playtime; crafted mirrors from plain glass; stayed up all night to watch a bud bloom.

One summer, she and her now-late father, AS Janardan, went a bright pink from chopping and pressure-cooking beets.

"We were determined to extract their natural sugar, after reading about the process in a journal. The kitchen went quite pink too," she says. "The 'sugar' ended up tasting funny and horrible, because the American scientists had used a specific variety of the vegetable, called sugar beet."

What she remembers most, Aghalayam says, is that any question she and her elder sister Jyothi had found an answer or sparked a conversation. "I was chatty and curious, and for our parents, there were never too many questions."

Now 49, Aghalayam has just been appointed the first-ever woman director of an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). She will head the Zanzibar campus of IIT-Madras (IIT-M), in Tanzania, the first overseas campus in the 72-year history of the centrally funded elite institutes.

As director, Aghalayam says she aims to build an environment where young people are encouraged to look beyond marks and lucrative jobs, and tap into their inventive side, as she did all those years ago.