Dr. Gita Gopinath of Mysore is the first Indian full Professor at the famed Harvard University

Mysore, May 21 (JP)- Mysore had in the past produced great intellectuals and scientists who made their mark in the top Ivy League Universities in the USA or in the hallowed quads of Oxford or Cambridge.

Now, one young Mysorean has, through sheer brilliance, climbed to the very top of the rarified air of Harvard University's Economics department. The only other Indian to reach this height at Harvard is Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen.

The 38-year-old Mysorean Dr. Gita Gopinath has been appointed a full professor, the first Indian woman in the institution's history to be given this appointment. Gita's position as a tenured full professor of Economics at Harvard begins on July 1. University President Drew G. Faust confirmed the tenure of Gita last month, making her only the third woman to be a tenured full professor in the department. Her Harvard full professorship means that it is a lifetime post.

When SOM spoke to T.V. Gopinath, Dr. Gita’s father, now a resident of Kuvempunagar in the city, he said that his daughter's early schooling was at Nirmala Convent in Gokulam and for her Pre-University, she was sent to Mahajana College in Jayalakshmipuram. It was at this point that Gopinath realised that his daughter, who had set her eyes at the IAS, would do better against better competition and sent her off to Delhi’s elite Lady Sriram College.

Says Gopinath, "She was from Mysore, distinctly infra dig and she had to take on girls coming from top schools and she did it."

Gita topped the college and stood first in the University in BA (Honours) and soon after she followed it up with a Master’s degree from the prestigious Delhi School of Economics (DSE).

Gita then had the dream of topping the MBA at one of the IIMs. At that point, Gita like a lot of other bright minds in the Capital dreamt of a high-flying job after her MBA but as fate would have it, she winged her way to the University of Washington where she once again earned her Master's in Economics and followed this up with a Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her doctoral thesis was "International capital flow and real interest rates in developing countries.’"

With a Ph.D. under her belt, Dr. Gita moved to a teaching assignment at the Booth Business School at Chicago University before joining Harvard in 2005.

Gopinath told SOM that Dr. Gita has more than 30 papers in international journals to her credit and she has held research tenures at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Federal Bank, London School of Economics, M.I.T’s Sloan School of Management, Northwestern University and Oxford.

If all this is not enough, SOM discovered that Dr. Gita is also on the editorial board of various International Economic Journals.

Dr. Gita Gopinath, who works in the field of international macroeconomics, is married to Iqbal Dhaliwal, her classmate from the Delhi School of Economics days, a former IAS officer, who is currently Director of Policy in the Economics Department of MIT.

Courtesy: Star Of Mysore