Scientists and builders
Physicists, chemists, plant breeders, engineers, an archaeologist and an astronaut; three Nobel laureates among them.
Colonial Punjab
1849 – 1947
Engineer and philanthropist called the father of modern Lahore, who built its museum, post office and colleges and founded the Ganga Ram hospital.
Chemist of Government College Lahore who brought modern science to the Punjab and lectured on it in Punjabi in the villages.
Archaeologist from Bhera who dug at Harappa in 1921 and so helped reveal the Indus civilisation to the world.
Doctor from Gujranwala called the father of Indian pharmacology, who tested the old herbal medicines of India in the laboratory.
Palaeobotanist from Bhera who read the history of India's plants in its rocks and founded the institute in Lucknow that bears his name.
Chemist from Bhera who taught in Lahore and became the first director of India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.
Administrator and scientist who resettled Partition refugees, drove the Green Revolution from Punjab Agricultural University, and wrote the classic studies of Kangra painting.
Astrophysicist born in Lahore, who worked out the limit beyond which a dying star must collapse, and won the Nobel Prize in 1983.
Nuclear physicist from Hoshiarpur district who studied cosmic rays with Arthur Compton and led India's science institutions.
Two Punjabs
1947 – today
Aerospace engineer, educated in Lahore, who led India's space programme through its first satellite launches.
Biochemist from a village near Multan who shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for showing how the genetic code is read.
Physicist from Jhang who shared the Nobel Prize in 1979 for unifying two of the forces of nature.
Physicist from Moga, called the father of fibre optics, whose work on sending light through glass fibres underlies the internet.
Physicist born in Jhang, who studied cosmic rays and became India's best-known explainer of science on television.
Wheat breeder at Ludhiana whose new varieties, bred with Norman Borlaug's dwarf wheats, began the Green Revolution in the Punjab.
Physicist born in Ludhiana, a student and colleague of Abdus Salam and one of the founders of theoretical physics in Pakistan.
Nuclear physicist born in Gurdaspur who led Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission for ten years.
Rice breeder from a village near Jalandhar whose varieties, grown across Asia, helped feed hundreds of millions of people.
Astronaut from Karnal, the first woman born in India to fly into space, who died when the shuttle Columbia broke apart in 2003.