Case HistoryBeyond clinical
Soumya Swaminathan: two decades on one disease
She entered medicine almost by accident, then spent twenty years on tuberculosis in Chennai. That depth led to the WHO's first Chief Scientist post.
By The Editors
Independent
From the public record. Written from the published sources listed at the end. RICH DOCTOR has not interviewed Dr Soumya Swaminathan; every quotation comes from a cited source.
Their path
- 1959
- Born in Madras
- 1987
- Fellowship in neonatology, Children's Hospital Los Angeles
- 1992
- Joins the Tuberculosis Research Centre, Chennai
- 2012
- Director, National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis
- 2015
- Director General, Indian Council of Medical Research
- 2019
- WHO's first Chief Scientist
Soumya Swaminathan did not set out to be a doctor. “My love for animals led me to want to be a veterinarian,” she told an interviewer in 2019.1 She was studying zoology at Delhi University when she sat a medical entrance exam, largely because her classmates were taking it, and got in.1
The training
Born in Madras in 1959, she is the daughter of the agricultural scientist M. S. Swaminathan and the educationist Mina Swaminathan.4 She took her MBBS at the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune and an MD in paediatrics at AIIMS, New Delhi.42 Fellowships followed abroad: neonatology and paediatric pulmonology at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles from 1987, then paediatric respiratory medicine at the University of Leicester.42
In 1991 she came home.1
The long middle
The decisive part of her career is the least glamorous. In 1992 she joined the Tuberculosis Research Centre in Chennai, now the National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis, and stayed with the disease for two decades.14 In 2012 she became the institute’s director and launched a programme called TB Free Chennai.1
That depth is what carried her upward. In 2015 she became Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research. In 2017 she moved to the World Health Organization as Deputy Director-General, and in 2019 she became its first Chief Scientist, a post she held through the COVID-19 pandemic until 2022.42
Her current roles include chairing the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation and advising India’s national TB elimination programme. She holds honorary doctorates from the Karolinska Institutet, EPFL and McGill.3
Asked about being a woman in science, she gave a nuanced answer. “We were never brought up to think that we may either face obstacles or have an easier career path based on gender,” she said, while adding that she had sometimes felt she was not taken seriously in rooms full of men.1
What the path shows
Influence in global health is often imagined as a career of conferences and committees. Hers was built the other way round: years of patient, specialist work on one neglected disease, in one city, before any of the titles.
For a young doctor uncertain about research, the lesson is encouraging. You can arrive in medicine by accident and still build a career of extraordinary reach, provided you are willing to go deep on a problem that matters and stay with it.
Written by
The Editors
RICH DOCTOR editorial team
Pieces bylined to The Editors are written and edited by the RICH DOCTOR editorial team and represent the publication's own view. Every claim is sourced, and corrections are made openly.