“Vivek Murthy became the youngest US Surgeon General and the first of Indian descent after cooling his heels for more than a year for Senate confirmation as ‘America’s doctor’ in the face of strong opposition by powerful gun lobby.”

Software giant Microsoft named Hyderabad-born Satya Nadella as its new CEO in place of Steve Ballmer, making him perhaps the most powerful Indian-born tech executive in the world.

Indian Americans yet again paid a price for running more than half of America’s 150,000 convenience stores with many of them becoming targets when Ferguson exploded after a white policeman killed an unarmed black teenager in August.

Amid growing protests over the treatment of blacks, Obama named Vanita Gupta to lead the US justice department’s civil rights division charged with enforcing laws that prevent discrimination.

Kerala-born Stanford University Professor Thomas Kailath received the Medal of Science from Obama for his “transformative contribution to science and technology”, while Arun Majumdar, an Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay alumni, was chosen to serve as one of four US Science Envoys.

Chennai-born scientist Subra Suresh was inducted into the Institute of Medicine (IOM), making him the only university president to be elected to all three national academies.

Delhi-born Sujit Choudhry, a noted expert in comparative constitutional law, became the first Indian American dean of the University of California-Berkeley, School of Law, a top US law school.