Anna Mani: The woman who changed how India gauge’s weather.
It is said, that when Anna Mani was gifted diamond earring on her 8th Birthday, she threw a fit until her parents had to exchange them for books. This woman from middle class Kerala would go on to become a celebrated scientist.
Prof. CV Raman was known to be strictly against working of women at IISC. Anna Mani, convinced CV Raman to accept her as a graduate researcher on scholarship on the condition that she won’t talk to any men in laboratory.
She worked under Nobel Laureate Prof CV Raman on the spectroscopy of diamonds and rubies, and recorded Raman spectra.
From the years 1942 to 1945, she published five single authored papers on the luminescence of rubies and diamonds.
In 1945, she submitted her PhD dissertation to Madras University (Madras University granted degrees at the time at IISC).
She was #denied #PhD on the ground that she didn’t have MSc. They chose to overlook that Anna Mani had graduated with honors in physics and chemistry, and had won a scholarship for graduate studies at the IISc on the basis of her undergraduate degree.
Undeterred she moved to England on government scholarship to study Physics at Imperial College.
She ended up specializing in Meteorological instrumentation as it was the only field available on scholarship.
1948 returned to India and joined Indian Metrological Department (IMD) as scientist and in-charge of construction on radiation instrumentation.
In her 30 years career, Anna Mani standardized more than 100 instruments at IMD, installed monitoring stations across India.
She designed Ozonesonde, a device to measure #ozone in atmosphere, at the time world did not even understand the function of atmospheric ozone.
Her work on measuring wind speech across India, also laid foundation for India’s wind energy dream.
Anna Mani was a remarkable scientist and meteorologist, who stood up against many biases of her times. She retired as deputy general of IMD and is celebrated on one of the greatest pioneers in Metrology and weather instrumentation.
Reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkCtkZ4QwWo
https://www.ias.ac.in/public/Resources/Initiatives/Women_in_Science/Contributors/annamani.pdf
https://www.thebetterindia.com/83063/anna-mani-scientist-meteorology-ozone-wind-energy/
https://scientificwomen.net/women/mani-anna-110
https://info.umkc.edu/unews/celebrating-women-in-stem-anna-mani
