This post was originally published on our partner website India.com.
May is a month full of celebration: the arrival of spring, remembering those who died serving in the armed forces, and honoring the achievements of Asian-Pacific Americans. May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.
Here are five extraordinary South Asian-Americans who remind South Asian communities everywhere that no matter where we come from, we can achieve absolutely anything.
1. Sunita Williams
As if being an astronaut didn’t come with enough bragging rights, Indo-Slovenian Sunita Williams is also a record-breaking spacewalker—she holds the title of most spacewalk time, total spacewalks, and longest single space flight, in the women’s categories.
Williams served in the United States Navy before joining NASA, and she was part of STS-116, a space shuttle launch to the International Space Station on Dec 9, 2006. The mission lasted nearly 13 days.
Ever an Indian at heart, Williams is said to have carried a small statue of Ganesh, samosas, and a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, during her space missions.
2. Floyd Cardoz
Chef, businessman, writer, and TV personality, Floyd Cardoz, has more to celebrate than just his revered meals.
Cardoz was raised in Bombay, where he apprenticed in the kitchen of the Taj Mahal Intercontinental Hotel. After extensive schooling in Switzerland, he moved to New York to work under Chef Gray Kunz before opening his own restaurant, Tabla, in 1998.
The culinary wizard also won Bravo’s “Top Chef Masters” Season 3, and earned $100,000 to fund his charity Young Scientists Cancer Research at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital.
After resigning as the Executive Chef of North End Grill in New York, Cardoz plans to pursue his passion projects, which highlight his roots of cooking with Indian flavors. He hopes to open a restaurant in India and write a second cookbook.
3. Rachel Roy
An accomplished fashion designer and entrepreneur, Rachel Roy is a staple in young women’s fashion.
Roy, whose father is Indian and mother is Dutch, moved to New York City post-college to pursue her dream of working in the fashion industry.
In 2005, Roy launched her collection, Rachel Roy, and later another more affordable line RACHEL Rachel Roy, which sells exclusively at Macy’s. Her lines also sell at high-end stores such as Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue.
Roy’s celebrity clients include Penelope Cruz, Michelle Obama, Kim Kardashian and Tyra Banks.
4. Nikki Haley
Indo-American politician Nimrata Nikki Randhawa Haley is the first woman to serve as the Governor of South Carolina.
Haley grew up in a Sikh household in America after her parents emigrated from the Amritsar District in India.
The Republican governor’s policies and positions include pro-life, enforced immigration laws and lower taxes.
Haley identifies as a Christian but attends services for both Sikh and Methodist practices.
She released her memoir “Can’t Is Not an Option: My American Story” in 2012. Haley is serving her second term and is the youngest governor to date.
5. Manoj Shyamalan
Manoj Shyamalan, known to moviegoers as M. Night Shyamalan, is an entertainment industry heavyweight.
With a career spanning over two decades, Shymalan is mostly known as a film director, but has worked as a screenwriter, producer and even as a furtive actor.
The multi-talented director had an interest in filmmaking and production from a young age. He shot to international fame after directing and writing “The Sixth Sense.”
Since then, Shyamalan’s name has been associated with themes of mystery and intrigue with his movies following supernatural plotlines that often leave audiences dumbfounded.
His latest venture includes executive producing the TV series “Wayward Pines.”
Sonali is as a freelance journalist and community activist based out of New Jersey. She spent the last three years living in India, which inspired Sonali to begin documenting her experiences as an Indian-American both in the U.S. and abroad. Her main topics of writing include lifestyle, entertainment, and health and wellness. You can follow Sonali’s work and travels on Twitter or on her blog How Strait the Gait.
Just a hop away from the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple is the headquarters of a groundbreaking biotech company, started by a South Asian trailblazer named Nina Tandon. Tandon has been running her startup Epibone, for over a decade, with the mission to grow bone and cartilage for skeletal reconstruction — an endeavor that presents commercialization opportunities in the medical field. Prior to that, she was a PhD and MBA graduate from MIT and Columbia University, respectively. I met Nina Tandon at our alma mater, The Cooper Union, where she was a speaker at a TEDx event we hosted. She stayed in my mind for years after graduating; I was in awe of the grit paragon before me and all that she had achieved by deciding to pursue multiple technical degrees, and then channeling her enterprising spirit to start her own company. I finally sent an email asking her if we can chat about her journey and what eventually led her to start a biotechnology firm in New York City; an industry that has recently seen traction in areas such as Brooklyn Navy Yard and Sunset Park.
Nina Tandon grew up in a nuclear family with two sisters and one brother. Hailing from a family of engineers, almost all of the Tandon children went to the same unassuming college in the heart of the East Village — The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
“I guess I was from a little bit of a geeky family of four kids. All four of us eventually became engineers,” Tandon said, reflecting on her background. “I wasn’t that into sports as a kid. I was kind of told I was a little klutzy. I don’t know if I really was! I was interested in community theater. It was called the Main Street Theater, and I really enjoyed doing all these musicals and stuff. I think that was probably my most favorite hobby. I also liked sewing clothes for myself and my stuffed animals.”
The best part about Tandon’s response was the way her genuine passion for these creative subjects shone through. Her interests were like any other child’s. So how did she choose her major? What were the little decisions that led her to pursue the path that she is on today?
Both of Tandon’s grandfathers were engineers working on either canals or railroads. This played a key role in her parents decision to emphasize STEM education early on; Tandon even took college-level classes in high school. She was raised with parents who believed that sitting at the table was an earned opportunity, so they naturally coaxed their children onto the known and sturdy path of science and math.
CEO Nina Tandon working behind the scenes at her biotech company, Epibone.
As South Asian women, we talk a lot about generational trauma and not enough about how generational career paths steer us towards certain specialties. Tandon pointed out that one parent being an engineer is a big factor in determining if you’ll be an engineer.
“I felt like that [engineering] was a preordained destiny for me, and that I had to kind of fight for [keeping] humanities in my life. So I kept doing high school drama. I studied languages like Italian, Latin and French. I really wanted to have a broader education.”
Higher Academia
Upon graduating from Cooper with a degree in electrical engineering, Tandon found herself at the nexus of both a historical and personal moment. The Human Genome Project, an international research project led by a team of scientists to define and sequence the base pairs of human DNA, had just wrapped up, establishing the significance of genes and how they can be modified to cure diseases. At the same time, Tandon’s brother was diagnosed with a genetic retinal disease which motivated her to join a retinal implant project at MIT.
“I felt it [his condition] could better be cured by genetic cures than by engineering approaches to neural prosthetics; it was a big ‘aha’ moment for me. I discovered the beauty and pervasiveness of electrical currents in the body. I was an electrical engineer, so I was really drawn to cardiac development, wound-healing, and how you can use traditional engineering techniques to modify, say, technical signals to quote cells into becoming new tissues. I was drawn to that for my PhD. I was growing electrically-active tissues like skin and cardiac, and I was really drawn to the wider world of healthcare as I moved into consulting after my PhD.”
Tandon pivoted back to academia because that’s where some of the most interesting companies were coming from. There were some companies developing skin in the early 2000s. And on the other side of the spectrum, there were those working on cardiac tissue that have multiple cell types, and electromechanical coupling which would not deliver results in the near term. But in the middle there was cartilage and it’s a tissue that affects millions every year.
“As a society, we’re replacing millions of joints per year, just because of a couple of millimeters of damaged cartilage. And growing cartilage and growing bone isn’t as hard as growing cardiac tissue. So I thought to myself, in the next 10 to 15 years, we’re going to make an impact.”
Working at McKinsey after her PhD, Tandon got a 30,000 foot view of the healthcare industry and understood the nuances of healthcare policy on technologies.
“It’s about big companies buying little companies. That I don’t think is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to make a little company. I was thinking to myself; I’m growing all these things in the microscope, but they’re related to the politics and the economics of the world.”
Tandon followed her intrinsic passion and curiosity within the space, channeling her inner theater kid that brimmed with creativity and wonder. After identifying that building a company was what she wanted to do, Tandon thought the best way to really build it, while working on the idea, was to pursue an executive MBA at Columbia.There she was able to dive deep into the ethical issues that lay in the biomedical field, including understanding the repercussions of the Affordable Care Act, or the stem cell wars.
“If I want to transform technologies, and from benchtop to bedside, I’m going to probably need to transform myself from a PhD student and a scientist to an entrepreneur.”
And thus, Epibone was born.
Innovation in the biotechnology space can take years due to lengthy R&D times and process approvals. After years of hard work, Epibone received FDA approval for their osteochondral product (living cartilage affixed to a bone base) to go into clinical trials for indications in the knee.
“There was no singular ‘aha’ moment, but several. Biotechnology takes so long; it’s more gradual.”
An Alternate Career Path and Life Advice
If you ask almost any high-schooler, interested in the medical space, what they want to be, the answer is inevitably a healthcare worker (ie. doctor, nurse, physician’s assistant, etc.) In general, South Asians tend to have a one-dimensional focus when on the medical school track, since that is what the applications require: incessant and obsessive dedication to a career path that is emotionally, physically, and financially grueling.
However, Tandon’s career path is an important one to consider as it provides an alternative yet impactful option for those who want to make a difference in public health. You can have an impact on public health — an area that the pandemic proved to be important to each every person on this planet — without going to medical school at all. Some examples include working in medical policy, pharmaceutical engineering, biomedical devices, and bioinformatics.
“There’s a million ways to contribute to society, even if you’re more interested in helping to foster human health than just being the person who can implement society’s current best practices for medical care. I would just urge everyone, parents included, to take that broader view that entrepreneurship might be a better way to help the world.”
Tandon’s journey from engineering to entrepreneurship is one that isn’t usually explored in the context of the South Asian diaspora. Often South Asian Americans, or immigrants, remain in the middle management sector, even after racking up multiple technical and business degrees at amazing schools. Ultimately, it is up to the individual to determine where their happiness can stem from. Some that have gone through the immigration journey may be at their mental limits to pursue additional risk. For some, the immigration journey may have the countering effect: the “make the most of what you can” effect, despite the adversities faced. The capacity to take a risk and believe in building something without expecting immediate returns creates the necessary vacuum for advanced innovation.
Recently, Epibone received FDA approval for their osteochondral product to go into clinical trials
Tandon ultimately chased her curiosity for electromechanical system design, biomedical politics, and the human condition around aging. Being raised in a family of engineers, and with the freedom to explore her artistic self, Tandon was allowed to be a “klutz” and deeply learn from her interests and her failures. Tandon was also well aware that the destination she desired was all about a long journey. With Silicon Valley, tech tycoons, and unicorn startups abundant in the news, it is easy to forget that every industry requires patience and dedication before immediate results…or revenue.
With resounding clarity, Tandon passionately stated that entrepreneurship isn’t entirely based on innate, creative talent. Much like any artist, it is important to hone the skill through hours of work; in the case of biotech entrepreneurship, this can look like hours of case studies and fervent discussions with professors and students. Doing her MBA gave her the chance to treat her time at Columbia as an accelerator program, giving her access to world-class professors and research facilities.
Tandon’s inspirational story is a reminder that our careers develop as we do. So often young adults are plagued with fear of what the future can and should hold. However, if we approach our careers with a growth mindset, there are opportunities that spur from internal curiosity and external support.
To learn more about Epibone, visit thewebsite. To learn more about Nina Tandon, clickhere.
Raised in Edison, NJ Anushree is an avid reader, imaginative creative writer, dramatic storyteller, obsessive shopper, experimental yogi, and a … Read more ›
Sonali is as a freelance journalist and community activist based out of New Jersey. She spent the last three years living in India, which inspired Sonali to begin documenting her experiences as an Indian-American both in the U.S. and abroad. Her main topics of writing include lifestyle, entertainment, and health and wellness. You can follow Sonali’s work and travels on Twitter or on her blog How Strait the Gait.
