Gagandeep Kang

Professor and Laboratory Director

MD, PhD, FRCPath, FAAM, FASc, FNASc, FNA, FFPH, FRS

The Wellcome Trust Research Laboratory, Division of Gastrointestinal Sciences, Christian Medical College, Vellore, TN-632004, India

Gagandeep Kang is the first woman from India to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. She is also the first Indian woman to be elected to Fellowship of the American Academy of Microbiology and the only physician-scientist to receive the Infosys Award in Life Sciences. Gagandeep Kang received her training in medicine and microbiology at the Christian Medical College, Vellore in southern India and is Professor of Microbiology at the Christian Medical College (CMC) in Vellore, India. She works on enteric infections in children, particularly on transmission and immune responses, in order to design effective interventions. Current studies include active hospital and community based surveillance and clinical trials of new and existing vaccines, with use of molecular based assays to study the diversity of pathogens and the immune response of children with viral and parasitic enteric infections

On this momentous occasion of the 10th Convocation Ceremony of IIIT-Delhi, I extend my heartiest congratulations to the graduating batch of 2021, their supportive families, guardians, and the diligent faculty and staff of the Institute.

It is daunting when our world turns upside down. We are forced to do things differently from what is familiar or, let us say, 'normal.' Over this past one and a half years, we have lived in a world full of uncertainties. We have witnessed some of the most horrifying times. I am sure when you began your journey with IIIT-Delhi, none of you could have envisaged this extraordinary challenge that crossed your path. Indeed, it was a challenge for all of us here as well. The people you look to for guidance, be it your family or your professors, your Institute, were all as unsure about what the future holds as you were. However, IIIT-Delhi stood together as a community through these unprecedented times. All its members were lending a helping hand in times of dire need. I commend your spirit and the way you have navigated throughout this difficult period and emerged as winners.

I also admire the resolve with which each of you, your family members, the faculty, the officials and staff of the Institute, and others involved, have endured the pandemic. Overcoming the many obstacles, your perseverance and determination have ensured a relatively smooth transition and completion of different academic activities of the Institute. You have excelled despite the challenges of online learning, periods of isolation, constant fear about the safety of family and friends, the uncertainty of the future, and numerous other difficulties.

I doff my hat to your struggles because, undeterred by them, your growth has shown an exceptional graph. You have learned and accomplished so much more than anybody could have imagined during these testing times. It is because of your hard work and tenacity that we are here today, celebrating this big day. Kudos to you for your achievements! You deserve this celebration.

My dear friends, there may have been days amidst the pandemic when you felt that you have been thrown into a dark dungeon – lost and forlorn, alone and uncertain. Now, when you pause for a moment, look back and shift your perspective, you will realize what a long way forward you have come. You, my young friends, inspire me with your determination to learn, your grit and persistence to perform, your innovative ways to keep yourself motivated even during gloomy times. As you begin the next chapter of your lives, I hope you will keep learning, growing, and serving the nation well with your talents, skills, and ingenious ideas.

Through these dark days, we have all faced uncertainties, frustration, loss and sorrow; variations of which you will, unfortunately, continue to face in future. But this has also taught us valuable lessons on how to cope, how to conquer fear and look at every challenge as an opportunity; we have learned the importance of working together and of looking beyond one’s own problems and helping others in need. These are life-lessons that will stand you in good stead in the years ahead.

This is the second edition of a virtual graduation ceremony of IIIT-Delhi. I am sure all of you were looking forward to a traditional ceremony this year; believe me, we all were. However, things do not always go the way we plan. We should accept the world in all its warts and brokenness, but also its beauty, because that is what you have been taught here at the Institute: to face the real world and make it a better place with your innovative solutions.

I take the opportunity to acknowledge the role of our Director, Prof. Ranjan Bose, Registrar, Deans, Faculty, and all officers and staff for their efforts through the year, and in painstakingly planning and executing yet another virtual graduation ceremony. I wish to thank my colleagues on the Board of Governors for their unfailing support and commitment towards the growth of the Institute. I also express my gratitude to the government of NCT of Delhi and to our Chancellor, the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, for their unswerving support over the years.

Finally, IIIT-Delhi has been your family, and as you graduate today, I hope you remember that you will always be a part of it. As you step into the outside world, I am sure you will build new connections, but further strengthen the old ones. You have the power to nurture communities and contribute meaningfully to society. Do that.

I wish you a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life ahead!

Director's Report will be available on the day of Convocation

Brochure will be available on the day of Convocation

Mr. Karnik, members of the Governing Board, Dr. Bose, Director, faculty and graduands of the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, and parents. Thank you very much for the invitation to join you here at the 10th Convocation.

This is a very special occasion. It may not be exactly the one that you had expected when your batchmates and you started on your journey of education here. After years of hard work and effort, you have achieved what you set out to do. Except for a few of you, the path to this success will not have been easy. My congratulations to all those who are receiving their degrees today, with a special appreciation to those who have distinguished themselves and received awards and prizes.

It is, of course, a matter of great privilege to be from IIIT-Delhi which describes cutting edge research as part of its institutional DNA. The mission is focused obviously on excellence in Information Technology, both in terms of in education and research. But very importantly, to also be innovators who are socially relevant. So if the goal of your education here is to prepare you for outstanding work and citizenship, then what are the factors we need to thinking about? In discovery and in application, science and technology do respond to societal and global challenges. In my own field of medicine, engineering and technological advances, including in information technology, most lately have played a major role in discoveries and their clinical translation since the invention of x-rays by Roentgen in 1895. Since then, medical technologies from a range of scientific disciplines have led to improvements in health care, starting with molecular approaches to imaging, to what is currently becoming more and more important--in artificial intelligence and machine learning—which have applications in identifying and monitoring disease and predicting its outcomes.

Ground-breaking inventions, not just in medicine, but in every field of science, technology and engineering, in the past century and in this one, have changed the ways in which life sciences and other sciences work together to address major challenges in medicine and health care. This year health has, of course, been central. The pivotal events of 2020 continuing into 2021, have required us to mobilize the scientific, engineering and medical communities to work together in accelerated and creative new ways to address the COVID-19 pandemic and to develop interdisciplinary approaches to solving problems. And we have needed to do these very, very rapidly and holding ourselves to rigorous standards. In India, in particular, we have had a number of challenges because of the infrastructure that we have had to deal with. Primary healthcare was not a priority for India, although on paper, we have an excellent system for delivering care. Most recently the government had conceptualized Ayushman Bharat as a start to deliver healthcare to those in our society who were not served or are inadequately served. This did not meet the purpose that was thereon paper, but we have a new opportunity now through the National Digital Health Mission, announced just a few days ago, to try to truly address inequity. And time and our joint efforts will show what we are committed to, and capable of.

When we look back on the last year and look to the future, the question arises, did we really do a good job? How much damage did happen? And what does the future hold for us? In many ways, we got lucky. The fact that we have poor infrastructure at primary care was countered by the fact that this was a virus, that while it infected a lot of people, did not necessarily result in severe disease and mortality in the majority who got infected. However, because of the large numbers of people who were infected, we did have our health systems overwhelmed. We had issues that could have been solved through better logistic planning and through better supply systems.

We had outstanding successes in what Indian medical systems were able to do and in how society and industry responded. If we look at the examples of where we were in terms of production of personal protective equipment and ventilators, we were able to meet the challenges of those rapidly and with a relative ease. But we had failures as well, and those failures were evident in Delhi less than six months ago. The pictures that we saw, what was displayed on the media, the kind of panic that was engendered—some of it could have been done away with. If we look at the requirements that were sold to us as rational treatment, hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, convalescent plasma, a lot of people tried to do their best to help other people in need, and then these were largely wasted efforts.

Could we have done better? Yes, of course, we could have. Could we have countered some of what was communicated in media that was not based on science? We could have and we tried to. Speaking truth to power is not simple, and especially not simple in the context of a pandemic.

Nonetheless we all survived, with losses, and very serious losses for many. But we are in a stage today where we can look to the future. A lot of questions remain. Will there be a third wave? Are we done? What does the future of our society look like? What is it that we can do that allows us to build a better society for the future generations to come?

India is a relatively young country and you are one of the first generations, for some of whom at least, whose grandparents may have been born after India became independent. When we look around us, we see successes and we see how we define success. It worries me that in many ways, our definitions of success seem to depend on power and on wealth. We look around us and we can see a lot of problems as well. If we look at rankings, of India’s place in the world—we find that for many things that matter for individuals, and particularly for someone like me in the health sector, the health indicators like life-expectancy, infant and maternal mortality, human development indices, education, transparency, we rank well below other countries that also became independent in the 20th Century. But there are things that have changed and we have come a long way in the past 75 years. When I joined medical college, infant mortality was 125 per 1000 live births and now it is less than a third of that, life expectancy has gone by 14 years, the literacy rate has gone up by 30%. In the past few years, wherever we look, our world has changed quite dramatically and mostly for the better—we just do not always see the upward trajectory.

But in India and for the world, we do have a long way to go—and that places a responsibility on the faculty and on you, to build abilities and skills that allow for the transformation of students to enable them to contribute to society. The merging of foundational knowledge of the leading ideas that shape our world view, with the ability to think which is required for making informed estimates and inferences resulting in intelligent decisions, is the basis of education. To all the graduating students, you will be part of that changing India. And for you, I have three messages.

The first is to build your scientific temper. One thing that we have seen all too often in the past year is a belief in what science tells us is unsupported by evidence. This has been particularly true in medicine. I mentioned the need for remdesvir and convalescent plasma a little while ago, but we also had the proposal that traditional medicines could play a large role in preventing and treating COVID-19. We know for a fact that many of these are untested interventions and should not have been embraced either by our leadership or by individuals. We rely on scientists and doctors to tell us what is and is not appropriate and it is a sad fact that in many situations, we were found wanting. There was no need for the prescriptions that we saw—of 17 or 18 different drugs being given to people who could be managed at home. Oxygen was used for people who did not require it. We were told stories of what was happening in private hospitals, and thereby because private hospitals were not available to much of the population we had people struggle for public services. All of this because we did not follow a unified, evidence-driven, science based approach to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Will we do this again in the future? I think it is for all of us to decide whether we are willing to accept what is called eminence based medicine rather than evidence based medicine. I hope we will go for the latter. This is true in medicine, but it is also true in every field—to think critically, to evaluate the evidence allows us to make informed decisions, allows us to think about what a better tomorrow is likely to bring. If we follow the science, including the uncertainties of science and discovery, I think we will find our way there.

The second message I have, is to think about embracing the struggle. Your abilities and skills are foundational to building your careers and to changing the world. As scholars of technology and creativity, you have the tools to change every field of knowledge and application. The problem really is that when our society expects us to succeed all the time, then we tend to pick problems that are likely to be solved easily. Look at today for you—today is a day of great success, but new relationships, new knowledge, new products, new approaches do not miraculously appear. Almost everything that is new and valuable require iteration, learning from what did not work. These insights come only after a failure. Accepting and learning from those insights is key to succeeding in every project and in life. Think of the opportunities that you'll miss if you let your failures stop you. This is why I say—embrace the struggle. When we struggle, when we fail, is exactly when we grow.

My third message to you is to empathise. When we look at what is defined as success, it is frequently about power, and frequently about wealth or what we own. And this worries me about our society. If we define empathy, and I quote here from Dan Pink, it is, “the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s position and to intuit what that person is feeling—to stand in their shoes, to see with their eyes, to feel with their hearts—it is a stunning act of imaginative derring-do, the ultimate virtual reality, climbing into another’s mind to experience the world from that person’s perspective.” I think we can do this, if we can understand what it is to walk a mile in other people’s shoes, we will understand what is it that we need to do to help not just ourselves, but society as well. When I think about my own life, and what I value as my achievements and my opportunities, it really is what I have done to help others. What constitutes success for me, as the world sees it, does not matter. What I have able to do to help other people really what does matter. That is what I value and I hope you will too.

Finally I think one of the things that is important for all students, to think about and prepare for, is what is it that you will do to be ready for the future. And for that it is important to understand that there is never any way to be completely safe, no foolproof way to live life. To plan ahead, identify what is critical, what the risks and threats are and understand their impact, allows for thinking about ways of mitigation and minimising poor outcomes. If we have thought through what problems we might encounter in the future, we can also think about solutions. We remove fear by creating a path to handling what might be the dangers and risks of failures.

To end, I want all of us together to thank our parents and our teachers, all of those who support us and build us up and keep us going as we set out to become contributors to society, and good people in our personal and professional lives. There is no question that there will be challenges to come, but with the strong base of your education and upbringing, you are well positioned to take on the future. I wish you all that is good in the world. Jai Hind!

Facebook Live Feed will be available on the day of Convocation

YouTube Live Feed will be available on the day of Convocation