T.K. Radha: The Original Woman in STEM
-Bhoomee Vats
T.K. Radha, or Thayyoor K. Radha, was born in Kerala in British India, an era when educating girls beyond high school was not so common. The fourth child of her parents, she was the smartest among all her sisters while pursuing higher education at the Presidency College in Madras, which is now known as Chennai, her father’s alma mater, and the only college that allowed her to be admitted at the time. Even though she scored the highest in mathematics, she really aspired to pursue physics and ended up receiving a gold medal for the work she did at Presidency College. This is about the time in the 1950s when the study of particle physics in India was still a new and budding field. It was at this time that Thayyoor met the Indian physicist Alladi Ramakrishnan, who was the founder of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai.
Alladi Ramakrishnan had decided to study a course in theoretical physics at the University of Madras in Chennai around the same time, and hence, Thayyoor was introduced to Ramakrishnan. “There were three other girls at that time,” Thayyoor recalled in an interview given to archivist Caitlin Rizzo in 2024. “We all knew of each other and were waiting for one another to join.” No one in Chennai had worked on particle physics yet at the time, but Ramakrishnan was aware of the quickly developing field, and he knew Homi J. Bhabha, who was the founder of the Indian nuclear programme and ran the Tata Institute in Mumbai. Bhabha was able to get each of the young women a paper on particle physics, and they spent the next three months studying, learning, and working on advanced concepts like complex variables, which they had no understanding of before. It was the beginning of Thayyoor’s lifelong fascination with particle physics.
Meeting Oppenheimer
In 1965, the turning point came. After a brief stint lecturing in Australia, Radha received a letter from none other than J. Robert Oppenheimer. The invitation was to spend an academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, which is an elite sanctuary for free scientific thought, once home to Albert Einstein. She arrived at IAS in September. “I met Prof. Oppenheimer one-on-one within a few days of my arrival she recalled. “He was a very kind man. When he heard from his secretary that I had paid my airfare to New York out of my pocket, he asked me to meet him and immediately issued a cheque for the amount.”
The two had several conversations during her stay. “He told me that he had read the complete Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit and believed in it and quoted verses from it when the atom bomb went off,” Radha noted. Although he had not visited India due to a revoked security clearance, he remained intellectually connected to Indian philosophy. “We discussed my research work whenever I had the opportunity to see him.” It was a brief but major association with a man who had changed the course of history. Interestingly, Radha was one of the earliest women of colour, and probably the first Malayali woman, at the IAS.
Recognition and Reinvention
Radha returned to Matscience in Madras by mid-1966, enriched by the Princeton experience and ready to contribute further. But fate had one more twist. On her return route, she was invited to give a seminar in Edmonton, Canada. There, she met Dr. Vembu Gourishankar, a professor of Electrical Engineering. They married later that year and settled in Canada (after marriage, she got the name Radha Gourishankar). She continued to teach graduate-level physics and publish papers. But a difficult pregnancy, during a time with no maternity support or childcare, forced her to step back from active research. She later retrained in computer science and worked as a Programmer Analyst in the University of Alberta’s Physics Department for 15 years. She even co-authored research papers during that time. She later became a well-respected volunteer in Edmonton’s health services and was honoured with the YMCA Woman of the Year award in 2014 for volunteering.
While this relocation shifted her away from the limelight of high-energy physics, it did not end her scientific journey. In Alberta, she pivoted toward computational physics, a field just emerging as a scientific powerhouse. She immersed herself in programming, taught herself new mathematical models, and became a senior figure in numerical analysis at the University of Alberta. She never craved public attention. She let her calculations speak. She quietly co-authored papers and became a mentor figure, especially for young women in academia.
Why Her Story Matters
Radha’s legacy is not just that she worked with Oppenheimer. It’s that she did it without the infrastructure, encouragement, or recognition that most of her male peers received. She carved her own academic identity in silence, leaving behind no memoirs or TED talks. Now in her 80s, Radha lives in Edmonton, Canada, according to Matrubhumi. Her life asks us to re-examine how many stories like hers have been lost or deliberately ignored. It took an archivist’s curiosity in the 2020s to trace her work through letters, academic records, and oral histories. Only now are we beginning to understand the depth of her contributions.
Radha’s journey mirrors those of many Indian women in STEM during the 20th century, brilliant minds eclipsed by global narratives that had no room for them. She straddled two worlds: a newly independent India trying to make scientific progress, and the Western academic elite who were only just beginning to open their doors to people like her. Her story adds a vital chapter to the global history of women in science, one that deserves more than a footnote.
