Growing up in South India, Dr. Padmaja “Paddy” Guggilla had an acute sense of the importance of education.
“We were lower middle-class, with not too much money,” she said.
Although her father completed only 10th grade, and her mother made it only to the sixth, the couple insisted that Guggilla and her three siblings go on to earn college degrees.
“My mother always told me that education and financial freedom is the most important thing,” said Guggilla, an associate professor of physics in the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Math at Alabama A&M University.
“Financial independence is very important.”
Arriving in the United States in 2000 to complete her master’s degree in engineering from the University of Alabama, Huntsville, Guggilla initially thought she would return to India. Instead, she stayed and earned a Ph.D in applied physics from the university that she now calls her employer.
“When I was in India, I was not really aware of Alabama, but alphabetically it came first, so I came here,” she said with a laugh. She completed her doctorate from Alabama A&M in 2007 and joined the faculty a year later, after a teaching stint as an adjunct professor at J.F. Drake State Community and Technical College.
