[3][4][5][6][7] On 25 January 2017, the Government of India awarded her the Padma Shri for medicine [8] for her contributions towards diagnosis and treatment of HIV.
[9] Suniti Solomon (née Gaitonde), was born in a Maharashtrian Hindu family of the leather traders in Chennai.
[10] She studied medicine at Madras Medical College and then was trained in pathology in the UK, the U.S. and Australia until 1973 when she and her husband, Victor Solomon, returned to Chennai, because "she felt her services were more needed in India."
[13] In her earlier career life abroad, Solomon had worked as a junior physician at King's College Hospital, London.
[3] She followed the literature about the clinical descriptions of AIDS in 1981, discovery of HIV in 1983 and by 1986 decided to test 100 female sex workers, as India had no openly gay community.
She has described how people shunned HIV infected persons; even her husband did not want her "to work with HIV-positive patients," most of whom at that time were homosexuals, those who self-injected drugs and sex workers.