Janaki Ammal was an Indian botanist known for her work in cytogenetics and phytogeography on plants like sugarcane and eggplant. She collected many medicinally and economically valuable plants. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees from universities in India and the US. Her work involved extensive chromosome studies of plants that provided insights into species evolution. She received several honors over her career including being named a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

1. SCIENCE

3.  Janaki Ammal was an
Indian Botanist who
conducted scientific
research in
cytogentic and
Phytogeography. Her
most noticable work
involves those on
sugarcane and the
eggplant. She has
collected various
valueable plants of
medicinal and
economical value.

4.  Janaki Ammal was born in 1897, in a Thiyya
family, Tellichery, Kerala. Her father was Dewan
Bahadur Edavalath Kakkat Krishnan, sub-judge of
the Madras Presidency. She had six brothers and
five sisters. In her family, girls were encouraged
to engage in intellectual pursuits and in the fine
arts, but Ammal chose to study botany. After
schooling in Tellichery, she moved to Madras
where she obtained the bachelor’s degree from
Queen Mary’s College, and an honours degree in
botany from Presidency College in 1921. Under
the influence of teachers at the Presidency
College, Ammal acquired a passion for
cytogenetics.

5.  Ammal taught at Women’s Christian College, Madras,
with a sojourn as a Barbour Scholar at the University
of Michigan in the USAwhere she obtained her master’s
degree in 1925. Returning to India, she continued to
teach at the Women's Christian College. She went
to Michigan again as the first Oriental Barbour Fellow
and obtained her D.Sc. in 1931. She returned as
Professor of Botany at the Maharaja’s College of
Science,Trivandrum, and taught there from 1932 to
1934. From 1934 to 1939 she worked as a geneticist at
the Sugarcane Breeding Institute, Coimbatore. From
1940 to 1945 she worked as Assistant Cytologist at
the John Innes Horticultural Institution in London, and
as cytologist at the Royal Horticultural
Society at Wisley from 1945 to 1951.

6.  During the years (1939–1950) she spent in England, she
did chromosome studies of a wide range of garden
plants. Her studies on chromosome numbers
and ploidy in many cases threw light on the evolution of
species and varieties. The Chromosome Atlas of
Cultivated Plants which she wrote jointly with C. D.
Darlington in 1945 was a compilation that incorporated
much of her own work on many species. Ammal was
elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in
1935, and of the Indian National Science Academy in
1957. The University of Michigan conferred an honorary
LL.D. on her in 1956. The Government of India
conferred the Padmashri on her in 1957. In 2000, the
Ministry of Environment and Forestry of the
Government of India instituted the National Award of
Taxonomy in her name in 2000.

7.  Kalpana Chawla (March
17, 1962 – February 1,
2003) was born in Karnal,
India. She was the
first Indian-
American astronaut and
first Indian woman in
space She first flew
on Space Shuttl Columbia
in 1997 as a mission
specialist and primary
robotic arm operator. In
2003, Chawla was one of
the seven crew members
killed in the Space Shuttle
Columbia disaster.

8.  Kalpana Chawla was born in Karnal, India, in 1961,
the youngest of the four children of Banarsi Lal
Chawla and Sanjogta Kharbanda. Both of them had
the childhood experience of fleeing their homes
during the late 1940s when India was torn apart
by the struggle between Hindus and Muslims
following the country's independence from Britain
on August 15, 1947. Chawla's father himself
narrowly escaped with his life, and eventually
settled with his extended family far away from
their ancestral village. Kharbanda was the
daughter of a doctor. Her father eventually
established a successful tire manufacturing
business.

9.  She completed her earlier schooling at Tagore
Baal Niketan Senior Secondary School, Karnal
and completed her Bachelor of
Engineering degree in Aeronautical
Engineering at Punjab Engineering
College at Chandigarh in 1982. She moved to the
United States in 1982 where she obtained a
Master of Science degree in aerospace
engineering from theUniversity of Texas at
Arlington in 1984. Determined to become an
astronaut even in the face of the Challenger
disaster, Chawla went on to earn a second
Masters in 1986 and a PhD in aerospace
engineering in 1988 from the University of
Colorado at Boulder.

10.  Posthumously awarded:
 Congressional Space Medal of Honor
 NASA Space Flight Medal
 NASA Distinguished Service Medal
 The Kalpana Chawla ISU Scholarship fund was
founded by alumni of the International Space
University (ISU) in 2010 to support Indian
student participation in international space
education programs.
 The Kalpana Chawla Memorial Scholarship
program was instituted by the Indian Students
Association (ISA) at the University of Texas at El
Paso(UTEP) in 2005 for meritorious graduate
students.

11.  Rajeshwari Chatterjee (24
January 1922 – 3 September
2010) was an Indian
scientist and an academic.
She was the first woman
engineer
from Karnataka. During her
tenure at the Indian
Institute of
Science (IISc), Bangalore,
Chatterjee was a professor
and later chairperson of the
department of Electro-
communication Engineering

12.  Chatterjee was born in 1922 in Karnataka. She
had her primary education in a "special
English school" founded by her grandmother.
After finishing her schooling she got admitted
into Central College of Bangalore where she
earned B.Sc (Hons) and M.Sc degrees in
Mathematics. In both these exams she ranked
first in the Mysore University. She received
Mummadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar Award and
M.T. Narayana Iyengar Prize and the Walters
Memorial Prize respectively for her
performances in the B.Sc and M.Sc
examinations.

13.  Chatterjee was born in 1922 in Karnataka. She
had her primary education in a "special English
school" founded by her grandmother. After
finishing her schooling she got admitted
into Central College of Bangalore where she
earned B.Sc (Hons) and M.Sc degrees in
Mathematics.In both these exams she ranked
first in the Mysore University. She received
Mummadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar Award and M.T.
Narayana Iyengar Prize and the Walters
Memorial Prize respectively for her
performances in the B.Sc and M.Sc
examinations.

14.  For her contribution and works in the field of
Microwave engineering, she won many awards.
Some of the notable awards and honours are
 Mountbatten prize for the best paper from the
Institute of Electrical and Radio Engineering
(UK)
 J.C Bose Memorial prize for the best research
paper from the Institution of Engineers
 Ramlal Wadhwa Award for the best research and
teaching work from the Institute of Electronics
and Telecommunication Engineers.

15.  She is a Fullbright
Awardee, a Senior
Associate of the ICTP,
Trieste, and has
received the Tamil Nadu
Scientists Award, the
Darshan Ranganathan
Memorial Lecture Award
(INSA) and a CNRS
Visiting Professorship.
She works at the
Institute of
Mathematical Sciences,
Chennai in the area of
nonlinear dynamics and
applications in physics.

16.  In 1957, when she was thirteen, she had just
entered Std. IX in a co-educational school in
New Delhi. The Delhi Board required a
student to branch off into either the
sciences or the humani- ties at that early
stage. The science group was sought after
because of better job prospects. Owing to
the shortage of lab space, entry was
restricted to students with marks above a
cut-off.

17.  Radha pursued her Physics Honours from Delhi
University and finished her M.Sc in 1965. She has
a Ph.D from Brandeis University where her
thesis was one of the earliest studies of
quantum crystals on the effects of helium four
impurities in solid helium three. Radha is
married to V. Balakrishnan who is an Indian
theoretical physicist. They have two children -
son, Hari Balakrishnan, is a renowned academic,
currently the Fujitsu Professor of Computer
Science at MIT. Her daughter, Hamsa
Balakrishnan, is also on the faculty at MIT as an
assistant professor of Aeronautics and
Astronautics.

18.  During the 1980s, when Radha returned to
India, she worked at the Department of
Theoretical Physics, University of Madras as
a Research Associate. She joined Institute of
Mathematical Sciences, Chennai in 1987. She
retired in the year 2004 and since that time,
Radha is continuing her research as a CSIR
Emeritus Scientist. Her current research is
on Nonlinear Dynamics, Solitons and
Applications in Physics, Connections to
Classical Differential Geometry. Radha
received the Tamil Nadu Scientists Award in
the Physical Sciences (1999) for her work.