Ashok Kumar Mago, Dr. Siddharth Mukherjee, Dr. Vamsi Mootha get Padma Shri,
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: India has named five Americans – three of whom are originally from India – as recipients of the 2014 Padma awards, which are among the highest civilian commendations that can be bestowed on anyone by the Indian government.
Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph will receive the Padma Bhushan, the third-highest civilian honor in India.
Susanne Rudolph is the William Benton Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago, where she teaches political science, and Lloyd Rudolph is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the same institution. The two awardees are a husband and wife couple who have co-authored eight books together, and spread their time across three different cities: Kensington, California; Barnard, Vermont; and Jaipur, Rajasthan, in India.
Susanne earned her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 1951, her M.A. from Harvard University in 1953, and her Ph.D. in 1955 from Radcliffe College. She has been with the University of Chicago since 1964, exactly 50 years ago. From 2003 to 2004, she was also the President of the Association of Asian Studies and of the American Political Science Association. She has been publishing work since 1967, including books and essays.
Her husband is no slouch, either. He earned his B.A. in 1948 from Harvard College, his M.P.A. in 195 from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Ph.D. in 1956 from Harvard University. Over the course of his career at the University of Chicago, he has served as the Chair of the Committee on International Relations and the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences and as Chair of concentrations in Political Science, Public Policy, International Studies and South Asian Studies in the College.
The Padma Shri award, India’s fourth highest civilian honor, has been bestowed this year on Ashok Kumar Mago, Dr, Siddharth Mukherjee and Dr. Vamsi Mootha, all of whom reside in the US.
Mago, who is based in Dallas, is the Chairman and CEO of Mago & Associates, an investment consulting firm. He was also a key behind-the-scenes player in the Senate-India caucus and the passage of the US-India civil nuclear agreement.
Mukherjee is an author and physicist who won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for his novel “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.” He is currently an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and staff physician at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City.
Mootha is a professor of systems biology and medicine at Harvard Medical School, and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He earned his B.S. with distinctions from Stanford University and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School, joining the latter’s staff in 2004.
This post first appeared in americanbazaaronline.com