Atul Chokshi, born on 24 March 1958, gained his bachelor's degree in metallurgical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1980 and went to the US for higher studies. Joining the University of Southern California, he earned a master's degree in 1981, and followed it up with a PhD in 1984. He continued at the university for his post-doctoral work during 1984–86 and did further researches at University of California, Davis from 1986 to 1988. That year, he moved to the University of California, San Diego to take up the position of a faculty and served the university till 1994 when he returned to India to join the Indian Institute of Science as an associate professor at the Department of Materials Engineering where he holds the position of a professor.
Legacy
Focusing his researches on the engineering mechanical properties of materials, Chokshi has worked on ceramic materials which has assisted in a wider understanding of how the material behaves in high temperature and the role of interfaces in the process. He is known to be one of the pioneers of research on the mechanical behavior of nanomaterials and his work elucidated the deformation mechanisms leading to superplasticity. His work covered cavitation failure, superimposition of hydrostatic pressure and creep of materials such as alumina, ceramics, ceramic composites and magnesium alloys. He has documented his researches in over 135 articles and the online article repository of the Indian Academy of Sciences has listed 115 of them. Chokshi was one of the scientists who reported the strengthening in nanometals and contributed to the establishment of a creep and tensile testing laboratory for examining superplasticity in ceramics at the University of California, San Diego. He was also instrumental in setting up a similar laboratory at the Indian Institute of Science with facilities for electro sinter forging for ceramics and electrophoretic deposition for nanocrystalline metals. He served as a member of the International Advisory Boards of the 1997, 2000 and 2003 editions of the International Conference on Superplasticity in Advanced Materials and has also served as a visiting faculty at a number of universities in the US, Europe and Japan.
Awards and honors
Chokshi received the Swarnajayanti Young Scientist Award from the President of India in 1998 and two years later, the Materials Research Society of India awarded him the MRSI Medal for the year 2000. The year 2001 brought him two honors, the Metallurgist of the Year Award of the Indian Institute of Metals as well as the elected fellowship of the National Academy of Sciences, India. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, one of the highest Indian science awards in 2003. In 2004, he received the Citation Laureate Award of Thomson Scientific and was elected as a fellow by the Indian National Academy of Engineering and the Indian National Science Academy; he became a fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, the next year. The Indian Institute of Metals honored him again in 2006 with the G. D. Birla Award and his alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras selected him for the Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2008. Choshi, a life member of the Materials Research Society of India, has been listed among the 100 material scientists with the highest number of citations.
