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Asima Chatterjee: India’s First Woman with a Doctorate of Science

A student of India’s “Father of Chemistry” became a first herself. In 1944, she earned a doctorate no Indian woman had earned before.

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23 September 1917: Asima Chatterjee is born in Calcutta.
She earns a BSc from Scottish Church College, Calcutta.
1944: She earns her doctorate from the University of Calcutta, under Prafulla Chandra Ray — the first Indian woman to do so.
1954: She becomes Reader in Chemistry at the University of Calcutta.
1961: She becomes the first woman to win the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award, for chemical sciences.
1962–1982: She serves as Khaira Professor of Chemistry, at the University of Calcutta.
1975: She receives the Padma Bhushan, and becomes the first woman elected General President of the Indian Science Congress.
22 November 2006: She dies in Kolkata, aged 89.

Asima Chatterjee was an organic chemist, known for her work on medicinal plants.
In 1944, she became the first Indian woman to earn a Doctorate of Science, from the University of Calcutta. Her supervisor was Prafulla Chandra Ray. See SciTech0060 — Prafulla Chandra Ray for his own story.
She researched plant compounds called alkaloids, particularly from Rauwolfia, Alstonia, and Vinca (periwinkle) plants.
She developed the anti-epileptic drug Ayush-56, from the plant Marsilea minuta.
She also developed anti-malarial compounds, from plants including Alstonia scholaris.

In 1961, she became the first woman to win the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award, India’s top science prize. She won it in the chemical sciences category. See Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar for the story of the man the prize is named after.
She served as Khaira Professor of Chemistry at the University of Calcutta, from 1962 to 1982.
In 1975, she received the Padma Bhushan. That same year, she became the first woman elected General President of the Indian Science Congress.
Over her career, she published roughly 400 research papers, in national and international journals.
Her research also covered terpenoids and coumarins, other classes of plant compounds, beyond just alkaloids.

Chatterjee’s work connects two generations of Indian chemistry. Her supervisor, P.C. Ray, built the field’s early institutions. She then turned that foundation toward practical medicine, developing real, usable drugs.
Her research on the Madagascar periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus, formerly Vinca rosea) sits in a broader lineage of alkaloid research. That wider field later proved important for cancer treatment worldwide, though her own focus stayed on epilepsy and malaria.
Turning traditional medicinal plants into chemically verified, standardised drugs was a defining feature of her research approach. She never treated folk remedies and modern pharmacology as separate worlds.