Ideas Of India 3.0: Annapurni Subramaniam, Nigar Shaji, Nandini Harinath To Talk About Women In STEM 'Reaching For The Stars'

Ideas Of India 2024: The three women who will speak during the session titled 'Women In STEM' are: Nandini Harinath, Dr Nigar Shaji, and Professor (Dr) Annapurni Subramaniam.

Ideas of India Summit 2024: The third edition of the 'Ideas of India' summit, ABP Network's flagship event, is set to take place on February 23 and 24, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Mumbai. Over 50 dignitaries from different disciplines will speak about affairs concerning India during 19 sessions spread over two days. The theme for 'Ideas of India 3.0' is 'The People's Agenda'.

The second session on Day 1, titled 'Women in STEM', will see three women from the fields of space and astrophysics shed light on how women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) are 'working in the trenches' and 'reaching for the stars'. Two of them are from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). 

The three women are: Nandini Harinath, Deputy Director, Spacecraft Operations Area, ISRO Telemetry, Tracking, and Command Network (ISTRAC), Bengaluru; Dr Nigar Shaji, Project Director, Aditya-L1 mission, ISRO; and Professor (Dr) Annapurni Subramaniam, Director, Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru. 

More about the speakers of Ideas of India’s ‘Women In STEM’ session

Harinath is the mission systems lead for NISAR (NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) and RISAT-2A (Radar Imaging Satellite-2A), a radar imaging satellite that will perform disaster management and weather monitoring operations by taking images of the Earth. It will also be used for military surveillance.

She was the deputy operations director for Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) and the mission director for RISAT-2B, a radar imaging Earth observation satellite that provided services in the fields of agriculture, forestry, and disaster management. 

She will also be the mission director for the ResourceSat-2A mission, which will provide remote sensing services. 

Harinath is the recipient of several awards such as the Astronomical Society of India Team Award for Mars Orbiter Mission 2014, and ISRO's Team Excellence Award for Satellite Recovery Experiment for RISAT-1.

Shaji is an Indian aerospace engineer at ISRO. In 1987, she joined ISRO's U R Rao Satellite Centre. She is the study director for Shukrayaan-1, India's first mission to Venus. She will also serve as the Associate Project Director for ResourceSat-2A. 

Subramaniam is an Indian astronomer whose areas of research include star clusters, star formation, galactic structures, magellanic clouds, and stellar populations. She is also a member of the International Astronomical Union.