Dr Prateek Sharma
Padma Shri, 2026 — Gastroenterology
The Vadodara graduate who made Barrett’s oesophagus a language the world could share — Prague criteria on the scope, risk on the page — and then came home, briefly, to take a medal for a life spent in Kansas City.

Born in Chandigarh; raised in Vadodara. Parents from Punjab who had settled at the medical college in the 1960s: father a plastic surgeon, mother a gynaecologist. One brother followed the father. The second son took the other road. MBBS, M.S. University of Baroda, 1991. America was not guaranteed for an international graduate. Internal medicine residency, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Gastroenterology fellowship, University of Arizona, Tucson. University of Kansas School of Medicine from 2001: professor of medicine, director of the GI fellowship, section chief at the Kansas City VA. Elaine Blaylock Endowed Professor at the KU Cancer Center. President of the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy. Chair of the ASGE Artificial Intelligence Institute. Hundreds of papers. NEJM. The book on Barrett’s and adenocarcinoma. Interviews in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, CNN. World Endoscopy Organization Distinguished Educator. AGA Distinguished Educator. Crystal Award for mentoring.

The work that changed practice: GERD that does not stay GERD. Barrett’s oesophagus as the precursor the world was missing. The Prague classification — length, circumference, a common tongue for endoscopists everywhere. Better imaging so dysplasia is seen before it is cancer. Risk groups so the low-risk patient is not treated like the high-risk one. AI at the Institute he chairs. Digital health. The patient in front of you, he has written, and the decision you must make.

When the Padma Shri was announced, eight hundred messages found him. A friend called his mother in Baroda and cried with her. He wrote that medicine leaves little room for spectacle. That fulfilment is not the same as success. That living in Kansas City with one foot in India had always felt like a bridge — and that the medal was a quiet joy he had not seen coming.

A fellow once asked why a man who published in the New England Journal still sat with reflux as if it were a calling.

“Because reflux is common and cancer is not forgiven,” he is said to have answered. “If you give the world a way to measure the pink lining, you give the next doctor a chance to catch it. Show up. Do the work. Do it again tomorrow. That is the Indian middle-class lesson I never unlearned.”