Ashok Das
Ashok Das is an Indian American theoretical physicist, an author and award-winning teacher of Physics. He is professor of physics at University of Rochester and Adjunct professor of Physics at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, India and Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar, Bhubaneswar, India.
Das was born in Puri, Odisha. He received his BS in 1972 and MS in 1974 in physics from University of Delhi. He did his graduate studies in supersymmetry and supergravity at State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received his PhD in 1977.
He was a research associate at the City College of New York, the University of Maryland and at Rutgers University before joining the University of Rochester in 1982. He was promoted to professor in 1993 and is still there. He is also the adjunct professor of physics at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in India.
Das' research is in the area of theoretical high energy physics. He works on supersymmetry and supergravity. In recent years, he has worked extensively on non-linear integrable systems, which are systems which in spite of their complicated appearance can be exactly solved. He has also been working on finite temperature field theories, generalization of the Standard Model to incorporate CP violation, and problems in quantum field theory and string theory.
Although he has published widely with physicists around the world, his particularly strong collaboration with Latin American physicists is well known. In fact, he has coauthored over 100 published research papers with Brazilian physicists alone. In 2006 he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach physics in Brazil.
He is known for his teaching and has received university and department awards for his teaching including the Department Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester four times, the Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and the 2006 William H. Riker University Award for Excellence in Graduate teaching.
He has written numerous books and monographs on various disciplines of theoretical physics in advanced and undergraduate and graduate level, like A Path Integral Approach, Finite Temperature Field Theory, Integrable Models, Lectures on Gravitation, and Lectures on Electromagnetism: second edition etc.
In 2002 Das was made a fellow of the American Physical Society "For contributions in the areas of supergravity, integrable models and finite temperature field theory".
