My Science School

E.C.G. Sudarshan was an Indian-American physicist and author. A professor at the University of Texas, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize nine times!

He was born in Kottayam, Kerala. He had his college education in CMS College, Kottayam and Madras Christian College, Chennai. He got his PhD from the University of Rochester.

His most important discovery was the Sudarshan-Glauber quantum representation of light. Glauber was infamously awarded the Nobel Prize for this. According to Sudarshan's own words, "The 2005 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded for my work, but I wasn't the one to get it."

He challenged even Einstein's theory that nothing can travel faster than light. This is the case of Tachyons, which are hypothetical particles and which travel faster than light. His other discoveries include the quantum Zeno effect, non- invariance groups, positive maps of density matrices and computation.

ECG Sudarshan was awarded the Padma Bhushan, in 1976. He also received the CV Raman Award. The Padma Vibhushan came to him in 2007.

In 2005, when the Physics Nobel Prize was denied to him, there was a hue and cry. Many physicists wrote to the Swedish Academy, to show their protest that Sudarshan was not awarded a share of the Prize.

Though side-lined by the Nobel Prize committee, he kept his humour alive. He was also keen on the Vedanta philosophy and often gave lectures on this.

E.C.G. Sudarshan died on 13 May 2018.

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Narendra Krishna Karmarkar a famous Indian mathematician is the one behind Karmarkar's algorithm. An algorithm is a step-by- step solution to a problem. You can call it a recipe book for mathematics.

Karmarkar's algorithm helped to solve problems in linear programming in a novel way. He found this method and published the results while working for Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.

Karmarkar did his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay and M.S. from the California Institute of Technology. He then took Ph.D. in computer science the University of California, Berkeley.

After that, Karmarkar joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. He continues to work on new architecture for supercomputing. The digital library, IEEE Xplore, has published some of his works.

He received the prestigious Paris Kanellakis Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 2000. The Prime Minister of India also presented him the Srinivasa Ramanujan Birth Centenary Award for 1999.

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Yes, Kanak Saha is a famous Indian astrophysicist and he did receive the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize.

Do you know what Kanak Saha and his team discovered? They found that a galaxy which is 9.3 billion light years away from the Earth was emitting ultra violet light! His team used AstroSat, India's first multi-wavelength satellite to observe this galaxy. It took them two years to analyze the data and to verify it.

This is an important clue to the origins of the universe, its dark ages and how light originated.

Kanak Saha was born on 04 February 1977 in Cooch Behar, West Bengal. He graduated in Physics from the Scottish Church College in 1998. For Masters, he went to Banaras Hindu University and completed his Ph.D from the Indian Institute of Science in 2008.

He is now working as associate professor of astrophysics at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune. He studies the dynamics of galaxies using cluster computer simulation.

He received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2021.

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Debdeep Mukhopadhyay is a cryptographer and Computer Science professor at IIT, Kharagpur. He is interested in Hardware security, Cryptographic Engineering, Design Automation of Crypto- systems, and VLSI of Crypto- systems.

Mukhopadhyay was born on 31st October, 1977 in Howrah, a twin town of Kolkata. He was interested in computers from a young age and was inspired by his father, himself a computer professional. He was a student of IIT Kharagpur from his graduation till Ph.D. His Ph.D. thesis won the Techno-Inventor Award (for the best Ph.D.), from the Indian Semi- conductors Association in 2008.

He worked at IIT, Madras as Assistant Professor from 2007-8. Then he again joined his alma mater in 2008 and is a professor in the Department of Computer Science. He has worked as visiting faculty at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and New York University Shanghai, China. He was also a visiting scientist at the CYSREN, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Debdeep won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar prize for his contribution to cryptographic engineering in 2021.

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Dr. Sunil Mukhi is an Indian theoretical physicist who has greatly contributed to the string theory and the quantum field theory. We have already dealt with the string theory. The quantum field theory studies the behaviour of subatomic particles in different kinds of force fields.

Dr Mukhi took a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1981. Then he did postdoctoral studies at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, in Trieste, Italy. He came back to India and joined the Theoretical Physics Group at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai in 1993.

He joined as head of the Physics department of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune in 2012. He rose to become the Dean after 7 years.

He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and the Indian National Science Academy. He has received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award for Physical Sciences, 1999, and the J.C. Bose Fellowship, 2008. He was named a Fellow of TWAS, (The World Academy of Sciences) in October 2014.

He is also the editor of the Journal of High Energy Physics since its start.

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Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, an Indian by birth, is a British structural biologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry along with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath in 2009, for his research into the atomic structure and function of ribosomes. Ribosomes are tiny particles made up of RNA and proteins.

Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu. Both his parents were scientists. He graduated from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda after getting the National Science Talent Scholarship. Then he moved to the U.S. Although Dr. Ramakrishnan started with a career in theoretical physics, he later moved towards molecular biology.

He did his postdoctoral research at Yale University and joined as biophysicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Afterwards he joined the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge in England. The next year, he published a series of ground- breaking scientific papers.

Dr. Ramakrishnan was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2004. He was elected a foreign member of the Indian National Science Academy in 2008. Our country then honoured him with the Padma Vibhushan in 2010, and he was knighted by the U.K government in 2012. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2003 and later became the society's first Indian-born president.

He has a dual citizenship of the U.S.A and the United Kingdom.

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Arun Kumar Shukla is a famous structural biologist, who rose to fame with his study on G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR). GPCR are proteins which are permanently attached to the cell membranes. These respond to sensory or other stimuli from outside the cells and also physiologically respond to hormones.

Shukla's team of scientists at IIT, Kanpur designed nanomachines which target certain signalling events. Several marketed drugs work with the use of these techniques.

Dr. Arun Kumar Shukla was born on 01 November 1981 in Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh. He did his PG degree in biotechnology from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Then he did his doctoral studies under the guidance of Hartmut Michel (Nobel Laureate,1988) of the Max Planck Institute of Bio- physics, Germany.

He started his career at the prestigious Duke University as an assistant professor at their department of medicine. He came back to India and joined the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK) at the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering (BSBE). He is a professor and heads the Laboratory of GPCR Biology.

Let us have a look at the many awards that Dr. Shukla received.

• National Bioscience Award for Career Development, 2017-18.
• 2021 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in Biological Science.
• B.M. Birla Science Prize (2017),
• NASI-Young Scientist Platinum Jubilee Award of the National Academy of Sciences, India (2016),
• CDRI Award (2018),
• Shakuntala Amir Chand Prize of the Indian Council for Medical Research (2018)
• EMBO Young Investigator Award (2017).

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Professor Pulickel Ajayan who hails from Kerala can be called a wizard in the field of nanotechnology. He is armed with the darkest material and the smallest brush. He got into the Guinness Book of World Records twice for these.

The darkest material is out of the wizard book literally - a carpet that reflects only 0.045 per cent of light. It's made of carbon nano-tubes.

Have you heard about the paper battery? This was also the creation of this Professor from Rice University, Houston. The paper battery grabbed the limelight in August 2007. This is basically an energy storage device on a piece of paper.

Pulickel Ajayan has 400 papers on carbon nanostructures. He is concerned about the environment and in 2012, came up with a hybrid material which could remove contaminants from water. He also developed a green battery made of lithium-ion cathode which is environment friendly.

He is currently working on how nanotechnology can be effectively used for energy storage devices.

Prof. Ajayan has won several awards and is on the advisory editorial board of several leading journals. He is also a board member of many nanotechnology companies. He is a visiting professor in many international universities too.

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Prof. C.N.R. Rao is a world-famous Indian scientist specialising in solid state and structural chemistry.

He did research in superconductivity, and his latest research is on the wonder material graphene and artificial photosynthesis.

Prof. Rao was a single child. His father was an Inspector of Schools, but surprisingly, he did not go to elementary school. He was coached at home by his mother. His parents saw to it that he was fluent in both English and his mother-tongue, Kannada.

Rao's passion for chemistry started during his high school years and he chose Chemistry for his higher studies, and went to the Banaras Hindu University for his Master's. Later, he got scholarship offers to do Ph.D. from four foreign universities: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Penn State, Columbia and Purdue. He went to Purdue and completed his Ph.D in 2 years and nine months in 1958. He was only 24!

84 universities have given him honorary doctorates. He has 54 books and around 1,774 research publications.

He is the founder president of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, and was the chairman of the science advisory council to the prime minister for many years. He is also Founding Fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences.

Now, have a look at some of the awards and honours received by this great man:

• Marlow Medal
• Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology
• Hughes Medal
• India Science Award
• Dan David Prize
• Royal Medal
• Von Hippel Award
• ENI award
• Padma Shri
• Padma Vibhushan

On 16 November 2013, the Government of India selected him for Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in India. Thus he became the third scientist after C.V. Raman and APJ. Abdul Kalam to receive the Bharat Ratna.

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Amit Singh is a famous Indian microbiologist. An associate professor at the department of microbiology and cell biology of the Indian Institute of Science, he studied how Mycobacterium causes tuberculosis and is well known for this.

Amit Singh was born on 18 March 1976. After graduating in science from the University of Delhi, he joined IIT, Roorkee for his Master's degree in biotechnology. He received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Delhi and went to the U.S for post-doctoral studies.

He came back to India in 2010 and joined the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology as a Wellcome Trust-DBT intermediate fellow. After four years, he joined the IISc, Bangalore where he is working now.

He is the head of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research. Research is done there on tuberculosis, AIDS and other chronic or long-lasting not infections.

He has received many prestigious awards. You can specially note these two:

• National Bioscience Award for Career Development - 2017-18

• CSIR- Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award-2021 (for bio-scientific research).

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