Dr. Subrata Ghose
 

As our founder, Dr. Ghose (9 December 1932 - 21 January 2015) developed our vision and strategies to address some of the world’s most challenging inequities for women and children. Previously, Dr. Ghose was a professor emeritus of mineral physics in the department of earth and space sciences and an adjunct professor in material sciences at the University of Washington (UW). Dr. Ghose spent 46 years teaching and doing research in mineralogy, mineral and material physics, publishing over 200 papers in leading scientific journals.

Before joining UW, Dr. Ghose spent three years at the Goddard Space Flight Center, working on the first lunar samples brought by the Apollo missions as well as the Russian Luna 20 samples, research that he continued at the University of California, Berkeley. His research involved the determination of crystal structures of numerous minerals and inorganic compounds and the study of the physical, electronic, vibrational and thermodynamic properties as well as magnetic and structural phase transitions of minerals using diffraction (X-ray, neutron, electron) and spectroscopic techniques (NMR, EPR, Mössbauer, INS, IXS, XPS, Raman, IR), which attracted international recognition.

In his research, Dr. Ghose collaborated with physicists at National Laboratories (Brookhaven, Oak Ridge, Argonne) in the US and ILL and ESRF in France, as well as scientists in Australia, China, Germany, India Ireland, Italy, Japan, the UK and Vietnam. In 1990, he received the Alexander Humboldt Foundation Senior US Scientist Award and spent six months as a visiting professor at the Universities of Bayreuth and Munich, Germany. He also served as a visiting professor at the universities of Santiago, Chile (1974), Grenoble, France (1980-1981), Perugia, Italy (1997) and Kyoto, Japan (1986). He lectured extensively in these countries as well as in China, where he was invited by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (1985, 1987).

He was a fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America and a member of the American Geophysical Union and American Crystallographic Association. In 2012, the International Mineralogical Association named a new mineral Ghoseite in honor of his research.

Dr. Ghose received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geology from Presidency College and the University of Calcutta in Calcutta, India. He also received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago in geological sciences, specializing in x-ray crystallography.

Dr. Ghose was fluent in ten languages and traveled extensively in all seven continents including Antarctica. Through his travels, he experienced poverty and deprivation firsthand in Africa, Asia, Central America and South America.