As a child, Amita Aggarwal, clinical immunologist and rheumatologist, and the Executive Director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Bibinagar, India, recalls living in many places. “My father worked for the Government of India, and every few years he would be posted to another place”, she says. “We were in Nepal for 5 years. In the 1971 India-Pakistan war, we were posted near the border; he was also posted to Iraq for some time.” These events gave Aggarwal new perspectives, and inspired in her a commitment to serve local communities. “People are the same everywhere, but each culture teaches you something. How migration happens, how the tragedies of war, misery, and displacement impact society—how these always affect the poorest of the poor the most.”

In 1978, Aggarwal enrolled as a medical student at AIIMS Delhi, remaining there for her postgraduate studies in internal medicine, with a thesis on lupus. By that time, she was planning to start a family. She moved north to Chandigarh, her husband’s home city, where she trained as a Senior Resident in internal medicine in the rheumatology unit of the Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research. That led her to a new programme in clinical immunology at the Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGI) in Lucknow, where she relocated to start training. “I may have been good at immunology and rheumatology clinically,” she recalls, “but I realised I didn’t have any exposure to laboratory research skills, which help you to understand pathogenesis much better. You learn by visualisation of those phenomena. And that’s a very different experience for a clinically trained person.”

Keen to extend her learning, a fellowship funded by the Asia Pacific League of Associations for Rheumatology took her to Melbourne, Australia. By then, Aggarwal had a young daughter, and although that meant she could not stay for the full duration of the fellowship, the time she spent at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute saw her return to India with a determination to continue this work at home. She re-joined SGPGI, this time as faculty, and remained there for close to three decades, during which time she developed a passion for teaching, helping to mentor a generation of rheumatologists in India.

Across that period, Aggarwal kept building her research skills, developing studies in areas which, in the Indian context, were still under-researched. She also spent time in the USA, at the CDC and the University of Oklahoma. “I used to go for 3 to 4 months, learn, and bring techniques back to my own country. But every time I went abroad, I always came back. I felt I had to get back to my own country and serve my own people,” she says. Back in India, she improved her institution’s autoantibody laboratory facilities, working with colleagues to “offer national workshops to train laboratory staff, help medical schools set up autoantibody labs, and train physicians in how to do, and interpret those tests.”

Aggarwal also applied these techniques to her own research interests, which were in juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Her initial studies on JIA showed that “in children from the Indian subcontinent, the spectrum of joint disease is very different than what had been reported from the West.” That made her want to know more. “Why was it more common in our kids? Is our microbiome different? Do we have greater genetic susceptibility to it? Or was there something else, or an interplay between the factors?” Over more than three decades, her innovative work has looked ever more deeply at the phenomenon. On SLE, her multi-institutional cohort study showed the wide-ranging effects of the condition not only on the skin and joints, but also on the “kidney, brain, and mental health”. As such, “SLE is a serious illness”, that “needs a lot of care, money, as well as continuous therapy, which is not easy. Patients need regular follow-up, but because of distances from specialised hospitals in India as well as lack of funds, they’re not able to come. It has a major impact on the lives of young women and their families.” Patients in local research cohorts began to form their own support groups, with Aggarwal’s team supporting them and continuing to follow up to understand long-term outcomes of the disease. In India, she explains, “we are all very diverse. Patients from the southern part and from the northern part of the country have differences in phenotypes as well as autoantibody profiles, which need to be studied.”

In October, 2025, Aggarwal, who is the former President of the Indian Rheumatology Association and served on several international working groups focused on lupus and JIA, became Executive Director of AIIMS Bibinagar, an upcoming institution. In her new role, Aggarwal has been engaged in day-to-day administrative duties while working with medical students to cultivate a humane attitude, context-specific knowledge that is embedded in local communities, and an interest in research. Her own studies are also ongoing. Further work on the impacts of genetic variations in SLE is planned. The efforts of Aggarwal’s group, as well as of the patients, has already seen lupus included in the Government of India’s “social support system”, which funds treatment for those who cannot afford it. “But there is still work to do. Autoimmune diseases are not accorded a high priority in India”, she says. “Gradually things are happening, we now have the data to show that these diseases are impacting many people…predominantly, disproportionately affecting women. The women will finally find their voice.”