Two Indian Americans in The Washington Post’s Inaugural ‘Post Next 50’ List 

Yale Law School professor Natasha Sarin  and surgical oncologist Vinod Balachandran are two Indian Americans among The Washington Post’s inaugural edition of the ‘Post Next 50’, a list of up-and-coming changemakers shaping society in 2025. The list “aims to reflect a range of viewpoints and highlight people who will be notable and whose work will be significant — locally, statewide or nationally,” The Post said. 

Natasha Sarin, professor of Law at Yale Law School with a secondary appointment at the Yale School of Management, was selected for her research centers on public finance and financial regulation, with work on tax policy, household finance, insurance and macroprudential risk management.  Before joining Yale, the 35-year-old worked in the government — as deputy assistant secretary for Economic Policy and later as a counselor to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at the United States Treasury Department. 

There, she realized that “a legislation lived or died based on how much it cost. And for decades, the cost of legislation had been determined on a fairly narrow basis, without considering its long-term impact on society.”  So when she left government in 2022, she decided to do something about it. As president and co-founder of a new research center at Yale University called the Budget Lab, she aims to answer questions that the Congressional Budget Office doesn’t even ask, like how early-childhood support pays off for society decades later. 

“It’s really about broadening the aperture of what policymakers look to when they do policy analysis,” she told The Post. “So rather than a cost estimate, a more holistic cost-benefit type of analysis that tries to quantify some of these longer-term gains.

“A major target for the Budget Lab’s analysis is already looming,” The Post said, “the coming fight over extending the first Trump administration’s tax cuts, many of which expire at the end of 2025.” Sarin has already begun making the case for using the moment for a broader debate on issues like wealth inequality and reducing the deficit.

Prior to her government service, Sarin was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and the Wharton School.

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Vinod Balachandran was selected for his groundbreaking work to advance personalized messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines for the treatment of pancreatic cancer. He is affiliated to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK),and serves as the founding director of The Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at MSK, a hub for vaccine science and innovation that positions MSK at the leading edge of a new generation of immune-based treatments for a wide range of cancers.

In a statement, Balachandran, 44, said the recognition “highlights the incredible dedication and relentless effort of my lab members and collaborators at MSK – their passion and commitment are what drives progress towards new therapies for pancreatic and other deadly cancers.

Foundational research led by Balachandran and colleagues u”ncovered a promising new approach to treat pancreatic cancer, a common, deadly cancer with no effective treatments,” according to a MSK press release. “His team orchestrated a landmark phase-1 clinical trial to demonstrate that personalized mRNA vaccines targeting ‘neoantigens’ — immune signals uniquely found in cancer cells — trigger a strong, long-lasting immune response that is associated with delayed pancreatic cancer recurrence,” the university said. “This early breakthrough work has ignited global interest in mRNA vaccines as a potentially transformative cancer treatment and has galvanized efforts to uncover and apply the principles of successful vaccination to other cancers.”