Indian woman scientist Sunetra Gupta joins famed UK league

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London: Sunetra Gupta, an India-born chemist and physicist has joined the big league of female scientists like Marie Curie in a first-of-its-kind art exhibition at the prestigious Royal Society here.
Gupta, who was born in Kolkata and is now a professor at Oxford University, is among an exclusive group as part of the 'Women in Science Portrait Exhibition' of the greatest female Fellows of the Royal Society together with newly-commissioned drawings featuring Royal Society Research Fellows.
“It is a great honour to have my portrait included in this show,” said Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the University of Oxford’s department of zoology, working on infectious diseases.
Her main area of interest is the evolution of diversity in pathogens, with particular reference to the infectious disease agents that are responsible for malaria, influenza and bacterial meningitis.
“The position of women in science is being increasingly viewed as a rational problem requiring scientific methodologies to understand and improve,” she said.
She has a parallel career as a novelist as well and has written five novels.
Gupta grew up in Calcutta of the 1970s and 80s and wrote her first works of fiction in Bengali. She is also an accomplished translator of poetry by Rabindranath Tagore. “Sunetra's childhood has had a great impact on her work, her early years were spent between Ethiopia, Zambia and England” said the Royal Society.
“When she was 11, the family returned to Calcutta, a city which continues to inspire her writing,” it said in reference to the writer-scientist behind acclaimed works such as Moonlight into Marzipan and The Glassblower’s Breath.
Her fifth novel, So Good in Black, was published in 2009, the same year in which she won the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award.