-Sarthak Thorat

Deepak Dhar is a theoretical physicist and a distinguished professor at the physics department at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune. He is most famous for his work on statistical physics and stochastic processes.

He is an elected fellow of all the three central Indian Science Academies - Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of The World Academy of Sciences. He has also received the Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar Prize, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to physical sciences in 1991. He has been chosen to receive the Boltzmann Medal, the highest recognition in statistical physics awarded once every three years, for exceptional contributions to the subject very recently. He is the first Indian scientist to receive this honour.

Born in 1951 at Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Deepak Dhar graduated in Science from the University of Allahabad in 1970 and proceeded to earn a master's degree in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He then moved to the US for his doctoral studies under the guidance of Jon Mathews at Caltech and secured a PhD in 1978.

He then returned to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research as a research fellow and became a full-time fellow after two years in 1980. He served this position until 1986 until he was promoted as a reader. He also had a one-year sabbatical at the University of Paris as a visiting scientist during 1984-85 and a month-long visit at the Isaac Newton Institute in May 2006 as a Rothschild Professor.

His work mainly focuses on Statistical Physics and Stochastic processes. He worked on statistical mechanics and kinetics of random lattices, which has helped understand these disciplines. He is credited with introducing the spectral dimension concept in the studies of fractals and helped develop a methodology for determining their critical phenomena using real-space renormalization group techniques, which was the first time the mathematical apparatus was used for—calculations on nontrivial critical exponents on fractals.

Dhar serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Statistical Physics, where he was a part of the editorial board for two terms (1993-96 and 1999-2000). He is an editorial board member of the Indian Journal of Pure and Applied Physics of the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR).

He has been a former editor adviser to Physica A, an Elsevier science journal. He has also been associated with journals such as Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and experiment, Physical Review E and Pramana as an editorial board member. Adding to this already extensive list, he was also a member of the Commission on the Statistical Physics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics from 1992 to 1995.

He has received a large array of awards and honours as well. In his doctoral days at Caltech, Dhar held the E.P. Anthony fellowship as well as the R.P. Feynman fellowship. He was awarded the Young Scientist Medal of the Indian National Science Academy in 1983. Also, the recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 1983. In 1993, he was awarded the J. Robert Schrieffer Prize. And in 2001, he received the Satyendranath Bose Medal. Most importantly, he has been selected to receive the Boltzmann Medal for his work in Statistical Physics. He shares his prize with John Hopfield.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepak_Dhar

https://theory.tifr.res.in/~ddhar/