Four Indian-born Americans named to Carnegie's 2026 Great Immigrants list
Nikesh Arora, Mahzarin Banaji, Sanjiv Chopra and Reshma Kewalramani are among 25 naturalised citizens honoured by the Carnegie Corporation of New York in its 2026 Great Immigrants list, released as the United States marks its 250th year.
Four Indian-born Americans are among the 2026 class of the Great Immigrants, Great Americans list, the annual honour roll compiled by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to mark naturalised citizens who have shaped the United States.
They are Nikesh Arora, chairman and chief executive of the cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks; Mahzarin R. Banaji, the Harvard psychologist known for her research on implicit bias; Sanjiv Chopra, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and author; and Reshma Kewalramani, chief executive of the biotechnology firm Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Their fields — technology, psychology, medicine and biotech — track closely with where the Indian diaspora has concentrated its influence in American life.
The four are part of a 2026 cohort of 25 naturalised citizens drawn from 21 countries, spanning academia, the arts, business, medicine, sport, science and engineering. Carnegie has published the list every year since 2006, and this year's edition carries added weight: it was released as the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its independence, framing immigration as central to the national story rather than peripheral to it.
For the Indian-American community, the recognition lands as a marker of how far and how fast it has risen. Indian Americans are among the most highly educated and highest-earning groups in the country, and names like Arora and Kewalramani — running major listed companies — sit alongside a widening presence in medicine, academia and public life. The honour is symbolic rather than material; it confers no office and no money. But as a statement of who counts as a great American, it places four people who were born in India near the centre of the frame.
The Great Immigrants list has, in past years, featured figures from across the diaspora's professional map, from technology executives to Nobel laureates. This year's four continue that pattern — and quietly underline a point the diaspora rarely needs telling: the Indian-American story is, by now, an American one.
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