Established and endowed by his wife, Mridula Puri, MD (Emory Medical Residency, 79'), in loving memory of her beloved husband, Surinder.
In 1965, Surinder emigrated from India to United States to pursue graduate work in engineering at Michigan State University. After earning his degree, he spent nearly 50 years working on some of country’s largest transit infrastructure megaprojects with the firm of Parsons, Brinkerhoff & Tudor. In 1975 Surinder began as a top engineer on design and construction of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) system and he was instrumental in shaping Atlanta’s cityscape and infrastructure.
Though trained as an engineer, Surinder was a true renaissance man he had the spirit of a poet and sensibility of an artist. He loved building bridges, literally and metaphorically, between places, people, ideas and disciplines. Extraordinarily modest, Surinder was beloved and admired by many people for his kindness, elegance, and humor and he loved bringing people together over one of his legendary home cooked meals.
In 2004, Surinder was diagnosed with stage IV Mantle Cell Lymphoma. He considered himself fortunate to have the best cutting-edge care through his medical team at Winship Cancer Institute. With that care and fortitude he not only survived, but thrived for the next ten years until his relapse in 2014. Surinder profoundly benefitted from great advances in research and clinical care for B-Cell malignancies. With this lectureship, Surinder’s family hopes to accelerate further significant advances in this area, and to extend those benefits to as many others as possible, by bringing in top researchers and clinicians to share their work and foster opportunities for multi-institutional collaboration.