Prof. Soniya Nityanand
Padma Shri, 2025 — Clinical Haematology and Stem Cell Transplantation
India’s first woman bone-marrow transplant specialist — and the daughter who brought a second Padma Shri into the same Lucknow house.

6 September 1962, Lucknow. Her father, Dr Nitya Anand, had crossed from West Punjab at Partition and spent a lifetime at CDRI inventing Saheli, the world’s first non-steroidal weekly contraceptive. He received the Padma Shri in 2012 and died in 2024 at ninety-nine. Her mother, Swarn, was an MD from the same King George’s that would later make the daughter vice-chancellor. The house spoke science the way other houses speak weather.

MBBS 1986, MD Medicine 1989, both from KGMC. Then Karolinska Institute, Stockholm — a PhD in immunology — and the decision that still defines her: she came back. “My father moved from West Punjab embracing a free nation with a resolve to contribute to its growth. That spirit shaped me. After Karolinska I returned to serve my country.”

1993, SGPGIMS. Haematology in Uttar Pradesh was still a rumour. She was told to build the service and a transplant programme. By 1999 there was a bone-marrow / haematopoietic stem-cell unit — one of the earliest in the country. In 2003, at forty-one, she became head of haematology. Then a stem-cell research centre. Then thalassemia screening and cervical-cancer vaccination drives across the state. Director of Dr Ram Manohar Lohia Institute of Medical Sciences. In August 2023, Vice-Chancellor of KGMU — only the second woman in that chair. She has kept seeing patients even from that office. Bone-marrow programmes followed her to Lohia and to KGMU, so that blood cancers and aplastic anaemia would not have to leave Lucknow to find a match.

When her own Padma Shri was announced she did not speak first of Karolinska or of being first.

“Papa will be watching and feeling happy.”
And later: “This award is not just a personal honour but a tribute to the values instilled in me by my father, who devoted his life to the service of science and the nation.”

A young haematologist once asked her what she brought back from Sweden that a machine could not.

“The knowledge that a marrow can be asked to start again,” she is said to have answered. “And the decision to ask it here, not there.”

Two Padma Shris, one family, one city: a chemist who gave India a pill, a daughter who gave it a second chance at blood.