Born in 1918, Anna Modayil Mani was a physicist and a former deputy director general of the Indian Meteorological Department.
Anna did her bachelor's in Physics and Chemistry from Chennai. After her graduation, she worked with the Nobel laureate, Professor C.V Raman, and researched the optical properties of ruby and diamond.
Gradually, she found her interest in meteorology, and in 1945, she went to Imperial College, London where Anna ended up specialising in meteorological instruments. Before this, she also went to the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru for research in 1940.
By 1945, Anna completed her PhD dissertation and published five papers. In 1948, she began working with IMD and through her skills, she helped the country design and manufacture its own weather instruments. She excelled so much in this male-dominated field that by 1953, she became head of the division. Under her leadership, more than 100 weather instrument designs were simplified and standardized for production.
Anna was a voracious reader since childhood. When she was 9, she read almost all Malayalam books in the public library and by the age of 12, she read all English books. Her thought and career goals were greatly influenced by her book-reading routine.
Mani was also an early advocate of alternative energy sources. Throughout the 1950s, she established a network of solar radiation monitoring stations and published several papers on sustainable energy measurement.
Anna was also the Deputy Director General of the India Meteorological Department and held several key positions in the United Nations World Meteorological Organisation. In 1987, she won the INSA KR Ramanathan Medal for her remarkable contributions to science.
After her retirement, she was appointed as a Trustee of the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore. She also founded a company that manufactured solar and wind energy devices.
