Asha Kapadia SM '65
Asha Seth Kapadia was the first female South Asian graduate student at Sloan. Kapadia was born in Lahore, British India in 1937, but the India-Pakistan partition forced her and her family to flee to India in the middle of the night. There, her parents—fierce advocates for women’s liberation in India—enrolled her in school and instilled in her a sense of equality. After receiving a scholarship to study mathematics and the sciences from the Indian government, Kapadia traveled to MIT and studied queuing theory, the mathematical study of waiting lines. She graduated in 1965, then went on to earn her PhD in the statistics department at Harvard University.
After working on a project building a rubella outbreak model, Kapadia became very interested in leveraging her management science and statistics background to impact public health through biostatistics. At the University of Texas School of Public Health, she expanded her research on queueing theory to issues with kidney transplant systems and healthcare cost models. Throughout her career, Kapadia mentored generations of students from diverse backgrounds by serving on several school committees and teaching as a visiting professor in India and Mexico.
She never forgot her formative years at MIT, serving on MIT’s Educational Council as an admissions interviewer and dedicating a study space at MIT Sloan (E62-181) to her parents, Dr. Dev Raj Seth and Mrs. Sushila Seth. Kapadia retired as Professor Emeritus, Biostatics at the University of Texas School of Public Health. Kapadia passed away in 2021 at the age of 83.
Senior Photo of Asha Seth Kapadia speaking to another student in the inaugural McCormick Hall c.1975. Courtesy of the MIT Museum
Asha Seth Kapadia poses in front of E62-181, the room she dedicated to her parents: Dr Dev Raj Seth and Mrs Sushila Seth. Courtesy of Dev Kapadia