Charusita Chakravarty (5 May 1964 – 29 March 2016)
[ was an Indian academic and ]scientist
A scientist is a person who conducts Scientific method, scientific research to advance knowledge in an Branches of science, area of the natural sciences.
In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, ...
. She was a professor of chemistry
Chemistry is the science, scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the Chemical element, elements that make up matter to the chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions ...
at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
The Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi is a public institute of technology located in New Delhi, India. It is one of the 23 IITs created to be Centres of Excellence for training, research and development in science, engineering and technolo ...
since 1999. In 2009 she was conferred Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in the field of chemical science. In 1999, she received B.M. Birla Science Award. She was an Associate Member of the Centre for Computational Material Science, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research
The Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) is a multidisciplinary research institute located at Jakkur, Bangalore, India. It was established by the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India, to ...
, Bangalore.
On 29 March 2016, Chakravarty passed after a long and arduous battle with breast cancer.
Early life and education
Chakravarty was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...
, U.S. on 5 May 1964 as the only daughter of Sukhamoy and Lalita Chakravarty. She was raised in Delhi, India and chose to give up her American citizenship in her twenties. Chakravarty was selected as the National Science Talent Scholar and went on to clear the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). She did her BSc Chemistry program from St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi
Delhi University (DU), formally the University of Delhi, is a collegiate central university located in New Delhi, India. It was founded in 1922 by an Act of the Central Legislative Assembly and is recognized as an Institute of Eminence (IoE) ...
. Having graduated from Delhi University with a gold medal, she went on to do the Natural Science Tripos from Cambridge University, UK. Following this, she joined the Doctorate of Philosophy program at Cambridge under the guidance of David Clary. Her thesis was on the spectra and dynamics of Ar–OH, an open shell system that involved a lot of nuances. Charusita then became a Post Doctoral Scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara, under Professor Horia Metiu. After a brief visit to India, she returned to Cambridge as a Gulbenkian junior research fellow in an independent post-Doctoral position.
Career
In 1994 Chakravarty returned to India for good. The IITs hesitated to give her a teaching position as she did not have a master's degree, even though she had a PhD from Cambridge. She did get an offer from IIT Kanpur, and then went on to accept a position in IIT Delhi's Department of Chemistry, where she continued to teach till her death.
Soon after joining IIT Delhi, she submitted a research proposal to the Department of Science and Technoogy and having received funding easily, carried on with her research. Her initial work was related to atomic and molecular clusters and over the course of her career, she became famous for her specialised application of path integral Monte Carlo simulation to unravel quantum mechanical effects in the properties of atomic and molecular clusters.
Her fields of interest also included theoretical chemistry and chemical physics, the structure and dynamics of Liquids, water and hydration, nucleation and self-assembly. International and national journals have published her articles and she was widely known for her single-author papers, published extensively over the course of her career. A few of her co-written works include, ''Multiple Time-scale Behaviour of the Hydrogen Bond Network in Water'' (2004), ''Estimating the entropy of liquids from atom-atom radial distribution functions: silica, beryllium fluoride and water'' (2008), and ''Excess entropy scaling of transport properties in network-forming ionic melts'' (2011).
Research fields
Chakravarty worked in the following fields—
* Theoretical chemistry and chemical physics
* Classical and quantum Monte Carlo
* Molecular dynamics
Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation method for analyzing the physical movements of atoms and molecules. The atoms and molecules are allowed to interact for a fixed period of time, giving a view of the dynamic "evolution" of the ...
* Structure and Dynamics of Liquids
* Water and hydration
* Nucleation
In thermodynamics, nucleation is the first step in the formation of either a new thermodynamic phase or structure via self-assembly or self-organization within a substance or mixture. Nucleation is typically defined to be the process that deter ...
* Self-assembly
Selected publications
Here is a list of selected publications and collaborative research works where Chakravarty has worked—
# Agarwal, M., Singh, M., Jabes, S. B., and Charusita Chakravarty, ''Excess entropy scaling of transport properties in network-forming ionic melts (SiO2 and BeF2).'' J. Chem. Phys. 2011, 134, 014502
# Sharma, R., Agarwal, M. and Charusita, C. ''Estimating the entropy of liquids from atom-atom radial distribution functions: silica, beryllium fluoride and water.'' Mol. Phys. 2008, 106, 1925.
# Agarwal, M. and Chakravarty, C. ''Waterlike structural and excess entropy anomalies in liquid beryllium fluoride.'' J. Phys. Chem. B, 2007, 111, 13294.
# Sharma, R., Nath, Chakraborty, S. N. and Charusita C. ''Entropy, Diffusivity and Structural Order in Liquids with Water-like Anomalies.'' J. Chem. Phys. 2006, 125, 204501.
# Mudi, A.; Chakravarty,C. ''Multiple Time-scale Behaviour of the Hydrogen Bond Network in Water.'' J. Phys. Chem. B, 2004, 108, 19607.
Awards and achievements
* Medal for Young Scientists from the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) (1996)
* Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (2009)
* B.M. Birla Science Award (1999)
* Indian National Science Academy Medal for Young Scientists (1996)
* Anil Kumar Bose Memorial Award of Indian National Science Academy (1999)
* Fellowship of Indian Academy of Sciences (2006)
* Swarnajayanti Fellowship of the Department of Science and Technology (India) (2004)
*Served as a member of the ''Abdus Salam International Center'' for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy (1996–2003)
*Associate Member of the ''Centre for Computational Material Science'', ''Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research'', Bangalore.
References
Other sources
Autobiographical article by Charusita Chakravarty in Lilavati's Daughters
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Chakravarty, Charusita
1964 births
2016 deaths
People from Cambridge, Massachusetts
Articles created or expanded during Women's History Month (India) - 2014
Academic staff of IIT Delhi
Recipients of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Chemical Science
Indian computational chemists
Indian women educational theorists
Bengali chemists
American people of Indian descent
20th-century Indian chemists
20th-century American chemists
Indian women chemists
20th-century American women
20th-century Indian women scientists
20th-century Indian educational theorists
Women scientists from Delhi
Women educators from Delhi
20th-century women educators