Gundu Hirisave Rama Rao was born in Tumkur (Karnataka), India, on 23 August 1937. He is a scientist, entrepreneur and a tenured professor at the Academic Health Center, University of Minnesota. He and Professor John Eaton visited India in 1981 under a National Science Foundation sponsorship (travel grant), to explore opportunities for collaborative research projects. They visited medical institutions from Kashmir in the north to Trivandrum in the south. He again visited India during 1990–93, as a professor and a senior consultant for the government of India under a United Nations Development Program (UNDP) called TOKTEN (Transfer of Knowledge Through Expatriate Nationals) sponsored by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. He is a member of the Minneapolis University Rotary Club . He is listed as a Senior Fulbright Scholar in the Roster. He is an active member of Rotary E-Club, RI.3190, Bangalore, India. He is the founder of the South Asian Society on Atherosclerosis and Thrombosis and AayuSmart LLC, an IT-supported web-based health management company. He has been actively involved in creating awareness, developing educational and preventive programs for the prevention of non-communicable diseases such as hypertension, obesity, metabolic diseases, type 2-diabetes vascular diseases and stroke. Dr. Rao has spent close to 40 years in Minnesota. Currently he lives in Maryland with his wife, two children, and three grandchildren, and spends half of his time in India, developing collaborative projects related to improving health care. Early life Gundu Rao was born in Tumkur, Karnataka, India. His ancestors on his father's side hailed from Hirisave (Hassan District) and on his mother's side from Thimmasandra, a small village 20 miles from Tumkur. He did his primary education from Hindu Gurukula. He did his middle school education in Government Western Middle School and Old Middle School near the District Courts. He graduated from Government High School in 1953. He studied at the First Grade College and obtained his BSc degree with Chemistry, Botany and Zoology in 1957. He obtained his BSc (Hons) in Zoology (1958) and MSc in Entomology (1959) from Poona University. Early career in India He worked at the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control, Bangalore, for almost two years. During this time he spent 8 months at Dalhousie (Himachal Pradesh) collecting and breeding ladybird beetles for export to the USA. That was the year when the Dalai Lama came to India via Dalhousie. He spent few months in the hill