Lillian Picken was born in Eureka, Kansas and graduated from Kansas State Teachers College (1908) and Colorado College (1912). She was assigned to Bombay when she first went to India under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1914, but transferred to the Satara area in 1919, where she engaged in educational, industrial, social, and evangelistic work. She founded the Child Welfare Center in Waduth, the Spiritual Life Center at Nasrapur, and an inter-denominational welfare center at Satara. With her close colleague Louise Fisher she founded the Rural Roadside Leprosy Control Clinic in 1954. Picken retired in 1957.
From the guide to the Lillian Picken Papers, 1921-1974, (Yale University Divinity School Library)