Dr. Renu Saxena

Renu Saxena took both her MBBS and her MD in pathology at AIIMS New Delhi and went on to lead its Department of Haematology as Professor and Head — a career of more than four decades spent almost entirely inside the institution that trained her.

Her research covers haemostasis and thrombosis, thalassaemia and the haemoglobinopathies, and leukaemia, with a consistent emphasis on molecular genetics as well as diagnosis. In a country where thalassaemia carries a very large disease burden and where molecular diagnosis was slow to become routine, that emphasis had practical consequences for what Indian laboratories could actually offer.

She now heads the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Medanta – The Medicity in Gurugram, a move from the public academic sector into private tertiary care that a number of senior Indian pathologists have made in the last decade.

Haematopathology sits between the laboratory and the clinic more directly than most of the discipline: the report is often the diagnosis, and the treatment follows from it immediately. Building that capability at AIIMS placed it at the centre of Indian haematological practice.