Four Indian Americans, including Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora and Harvard professor Mahzarin Banaji, have been named to the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s prestigious Great Immigrants, Great Americans list for 2026.ย Among the other honorees are Sanjiv Chopra, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and Reshma Kewalramani, the President and CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
The 2026 class includes 25 naturalised US citizens from 21 different countries and was revealed as the United States gets ready to celebrate the 250th anniversary of its independence.
Honorees are set to be recognised through the organizationโs yearly Fourth of July campaign, which honours the contributions of immigrants to American society.
Who is Nikesh Arora?
Nikesh Arora was born on February 9, 1968, in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, into a defence family. His father served in the Indian Air Force.
He completed his schooling at The Air Force School before graduating in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi, in 1989, and went to the US for an MBA at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.ย
After short stints at Wipro and Deutsche Telekom, he worked for nearly a decade at Google as a senior executive, holding the positions of senior vice president, chief business officer and president of global sales operations and business.
Before joining Palo Alto Networks in 2018, Arora was the president and chief operating officer of SoftBank Group Corp.
Who is Mahzarin Banaji?
Mahzarin R Banaji, born in 1956 to a Parsi family, spent her entire childhood in Telangana, India.
In her twenties, she relocated to the United States to study psychology and obtained her PhD from Ohio State University.
She currently works as a professor at Harvard University and an experimental psychologist, best known for her research on implicit bias.
Her work focuses on how unconscious attitudes influence people’s perceptions and decisions.
In 1998, she co-developed the Implicit Association Test (IAT) along with psychologist Anthony Greenwald to measure unconscious bias. Since then, more than 40 million people have taken the test to examine attitudes related to race, gender, class and other social factors.
Who is Dr Sanjiv Chopra?
Sanjiv Chopra was born on September 9, 1949, in India and studied medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi. His father was a physician, inspiring him to pursue medicine.
In 1972, Chopra moved to the United States for his medical residency and fellowship, beginning in New Jersey before later moving to Boston.ย
The 76-year-old is currently a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and has been a member of its faculty for more than 40 years.
He also holds senior clinical and teaching roles at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.ย
Who is Reshma Kewalramani?
Reshma Kewalramani was born in Mumbai and moved to the United States with her family at the age of 11. She completed her accelerated combined undergraduate and medical degree from Boston University before beginning her career as a transplant nephrologist.
In 2004, Kewalramani joined the biopharmaceutical industry, focusing on the development of new medicines.
She joined Vertex Pharmaceuticals in 2017 and became its Chief Executive Officer and President three years later, becoming the first woman to lead a large publicly traded biotechnology company.
Under her leadership, Vertex has developed breakthrough treatments for cystic fibrosis and has made it the first CRISPR-based gene-editing therapy for sickle cell disease approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Past honourees of Indian origin
- Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee
- Public Health specialist Ashish Kumar Jha
- Economist Gita Gopinath
- NASA researcher Kamlesh Lulla
- Former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy
- Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen
- Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai
Written by Bhavye Dhalla. Bhavyeย is an intern with IndiaTV Digital.