Atish Dabholkar

Atish Dabholkar (Marathi अतीश दाभोलकर) is an Indian theoretical physicist. He is currently th
Director
of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) with the rank of Assistant Director-General, UNESCO. Prior to that, he was head of ICTP's High Energy, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics section, and also Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at Sorbonne University in the "Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Hautes Énergies" (LPTHE).

Well known for his research on string theory, black holes and quantum gravity, Dabholkar is an elected fellow
of the Indian Academy of Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest Indian science prize awarded by the Prime Minister of India, for his contributions to physical sciences in 2006. Dabholkar was awarded the ''Chaire d'Excellence'' of the Agence Nationale de la Recherche in France in 2007. He is also a recipient of the National Leadership award from the President of India in 2008. In 2021, he was elected as a Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) for the advancement of science in developing countries.

Biography

Atish Dabholkar earned his master's degree in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1985 and his PhD in theoretical physics from Princeton University in 1990 under the guidance of Jeffrey A. Harvey. Subsequently, he worked at Rutgers University and then at Harvard University as a post-doctoral associate. After spending two years at California Institute of Technology as a senior research fellow, he returned to India in 1996 to take up the position of a professor of theoretical physics at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research till 2010. In November 2019, Dabholkar was appointed as Director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). Prior to that, he was head of ICTP's High Energy, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics section International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) and a ''Directeur de Recherche'' of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at Association Sorbonne Université in the ''Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Hautes Énergies'' (LPTHE) since 2007. Dabholkar was a visiting professor at Stanford University during 2003–04 and at CERN during 2012.

Contributions to Physics

In his work in collaboration with Jeffrey A. Harvey, Dabholkar identified a spectrum of supersymmetric states (now known as "Dabholkar-Harvey states'') ''''
and initiated the study of supersymmetric solitons in string theory
which played an important role in the discovery of duality symmetries in string theory and later in the study of quantum entropy of black holes.

One of his important results concerns the computation of the quantum corrections to the Bekenstein