Suniti Solomon, Founder‐Director Y.R. Gaitonde Centre for AIDS Research and Education (YRG CARE)

Abstract

, in Chennai, aged 76 years. Dr Solomon did so much to raise awareness of HIV infection and AIDS in India. She gave a moving plenary talk on 'The Social Impact of HIV infection in India' at the beginning of the 7th World Workshop on Oral Health & Disease in AIDS which was held in Hyderabad, India, in November 2014. We were saddened by her loss a few months later, but Dr Solomon has left a permanent legacy by her impact on the health scene in India and her establishment of YRG care which has carried out such fundamental and important clinical trials in conjunction with the NIH AIDS clinical trials programme, and which has been such a beacon in the HIV field. One of eight siblings, Suniti Solomon was the only daughter of the Gaitonde family who were prominent in the leather trade in Chennai. She qualified in medicine at Madras Medical College where she met her husband, Victor Solomon, a cardiac surgeon. For almost a decade, she trained in pathology in the UK, the USA and Australia, before returning to Chennai in 1973. In the 1980s, after reading about HIV and AIDS, she decided to track the virus in India. That decision set the course of her life.

The mouth and AIDS: lessons learned and emerging challenges in global oral health: introduction

“…Unfortunately, Dr Solomon died at the end of July 2015. A tribute can be found in this issue (Kumarasamy et al , ).…”