Mambillikalathil Govind Kumar Menon, FRS (28 August 1928 – 22 November 2016)also known as M. G. K. Menon, was a physicist and policy maker from India. He had a prominent role in the development of science and technology in India over four decades. One of his most important contributions was nurturing the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, which his mentor Homi J. Bhabha founded in 1945.

Born

• Mambillikalathil Govind Kumar Menon


• 28 August 1928


• Mangalore, Karnataka, India

Field

• Physics

Institutions

• Tata Institute of Fundamental Research


• Indian Space Research Organisation


• Department of Science & Technology, Government of India

Awards

• Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (1960),


• Fellow of the Royal Society(FRS)(1970)


• Abdus Salam Medal (1996)

To know more about M. G. K. Menon click M. G. K. Menon

Roddam Narasimha (born 20 July 1933) is an Indian aerospace scientist and fluid dynamicist. He was a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Director of National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) and the Chairman of Engineering Mechanics Unit at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore, India. He is now an Honorary Professor at JNCASR and concurrently holds the Pratt & Whitney Chair in Science and Engineering at the University of Hyderabad. Narasimha has been awarded the Padma Vibushan, India's second highest civilian award, in 2013.

Education and career

He obtained his BE from Mysore University , from University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering in 1953 and his ME from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 1955. He worked with Satish Dhawan during his time at IISc. He then worked with Hans Liepmann at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), United States to obtain his PhD degree in 1961.

To know more about  Roddam Narasimha click Roddam Narasimha

Abhay Vasant Ashtekar (born July 5, 1949) is an Indian theoretical physicist. He is the Eberly Professor of Physics and the Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University. As the creator of Ashtekar variables, he is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity and its subfield loop quantum cosmology. He has also written a number of descriptions of loop quantum gravity that are accessible to non-physicists. In 1999, Ashtekar and his colleagues were able to calculate the entropy for a black hole, matching a legendary 1974 prediction by Hawking. Oxford mathematical physicist Roger Penrose has described Ashtekar's approach to quantum gravity as "The most important of all the attempts at 'quantizing' general relativity." Ashtekar was elected as Member to National Academy of Sciences in May 2016.

Fields

• Loop Quantum Gravity

Institutions

• Pennsylvania State University

Awards

• Member of National Academy of Sciences,


• First Gravity Prize by the Gravity Research Foundation


• Massachusetts

To read more about  Abhay Vasant Click  Abhay Vasant Ashtekar

Vinod Johri

Vinod Johri (10 June 1935) was an Indian astrophysicist. He was an eminent cosmologist, a retired professor of astrophysics at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and an emeritus professor at Lucknow University since 1995. Johri had over 75 research publications and articles published in pioneering journals. His major contributions in cosmological research included 'power law inflation, genesis of quintessence fields of dark energy and phantom cosmologies'. He was the co-author of the first model of power law inflation in Brans–Dicke theory along with C. Mathiazhagan. He was honored by Uttar Pradesh Government by Research Award of the Council of Science & Technology (CSIR).

Institution 

• Indian Institute of Technology


• Lucknow University


• Gorakhpur University


• Allahabad University

Fields

• Astrophysics


•  Physics


•  Cosmology

Johri spent over 45 years researching in cosmology, acting as a research guide and principal investigator of various research projects of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Department of Science & Technology and University Grants Commission of India. Johri was a Commonwealth Fellow, a senior visitor at Cambridge University (UK) and a Fellow of Royal Astronomical Society of London. He worked as consultant for UNESCO at United Nations Development Program[6] in Iran and as a DAAD Fellow at University of Mainz (Germany), as a visiting scientist at Hansen Lab (Gravity Probe B Group) Stanford University (USA) and as an International Scholar at Fine Theoretical Physics Institute at University of Minnesota at Minneapolis (USA). He died in Dallas, USA at the age of 78 due to complications arising from Kidney failure.

TO READ MORE ABOUT VINOD JOHRI CLICK VINOD JOHRI 

Charusita Chakravarty (1964 - 2016) was an Indian academic and scientist. She was a professor of Chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi 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, Bangalore.

Research fields

• Theoretical Chemistry and Chemical Physics


• Classical and Quantum Monte Carlo


• Molecular Dynamics


• Structure and Dynamics of Liquids


• Water and Hydration


• Nucleation


• Self-assembly

Awards

• 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)


• Fellowship of the Department of Science and Technology (India) (2004)

To read more about  Charusita Chakravarty Click Charusita Chakravarty

Man Mohan Sharma (born May 1, 1937 in Jodhpur, Rajasthan) is an Indian chemical engineer. He was educated at Jodhpur, Mumbai and Cambridge. At the age of 27 years, he was appointed Professor of Chemical Engineering in the Institute of Chemical Technology (UDCT), Mumbai. He later went on to become the Director of Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT/ UDCT/ UICT), the first chemical engineering professor to do so from ICT.

In 1990, he became the first Indian engineer to be elected as a Fellow of Royal Society, UK. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan (1987) and the Padma Vibhushan (2001) by the President of India. He has also been awarded the Leverhulme Medal of the Royal Society, the S.S. Bhatnagar Prize in Engineering Sciences (1973), FICCI Award (1981), the Vishwakarma medal of the Indian National Science Academy (1985), G.M. Modi Award (1991), Meghnad Saha Medal (1994), and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (2001).

Field:

• Chemical Engineering

Awards

Professor Sharma is a recipient of a number of prestigious academic honours and awards including the 1977 Moulton Medal of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, and is himself commemorated in the M M Sharma Medal awarded by the same institution for outstanding research contributions.

He won the Leverhulme Medal of the Royal Society for "for his work on the dynamics of multi-phase chemical reactions in industrial processes". He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan (2001), and Padma Bhushan (1987) by the President of India. He was INSA President (1989-90). He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, Honorary Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (India), Allahabad, Fellow of the Royal Society, London. Subsequently he was elected Honorary Fellow by the Royal Academy of Engineering and is Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Engineering.

To read more about Man Mohan Sharma Click Man Mohan Sharma

Dr. Shankar Abaji Bhise  was an Indian scientist. Bhise has to his credit 200 inventions, for about 40 of which he took patents. In 1910, Sir Ratan Tata set up the Tata-Bhise invention syndicate in order to finance Bhise’s inventions. Among his inventions were a washing compound and type-caster machines, including the Bhisotype which could output 1,200 characters a minute.

To Know more about Dr. Shankar Abaji Bhise Click Dr. Shankar Abaji Bhise 

Shivram Baburao Bhoje (born 9 April 1942) is a distinguished Indian nuclear scientist who worked in the field of fast-breeder nuclear reactor technology for forty years in the design, construction, operation, and research and development. Indian government has honoured him with Padma Shri in 2003, the fourth highest civilian award in India, for his distinguished service to science and engineering fields.

Professional

Bhoje completed one year training in Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre Training School and joined as a Scientific Officer at BARC, Trombay. He started working in the Fast Reactor Section for design of an experimental reactor. He was on a one-year deputation to the Centre d'Etudes Nucleare Cadarache, France, as a member of the design team of the 13-mW fast-breeder test reactor (FBTR) in 1969–70.

Field

• fast-breeder nuclear reactor

Awards

• Padma Shri, for his contribution to science and engineering 2003.


• H K Firodia awards for his contribution science and technology 2006.


• VASVIK Industrial Research Award, in the field of Mechanical Sciences and Technology, 1992.


• Sir Visvesvaraya Memorial Award from Engineers Foundation.

 To read more about Shivram Baburao Bhoje Click  Shivram_Bhoje

Subbayya Sivasankaranarayana Pillai was an Nagercoil native Indian mathematician specialising in number theory. His contribution to Waring's problem was described in 1950 by K. S. Chandrasekharan as "almost certainly his best piece of work and one of the very best achievements in Indian Mathematics since Ramanujan".

Fields

• Mathematics

Known for

• Pillai's conjecture


• Pillai's arithmetical function


• Pillai prime

Contributions

He proved the Waring's problem for K ? 6 in 1935 under the further condition of (3k +1)/ (2k – 1) ? [1.5k] + 1 head of Leonard Eugene Dickson who around the same time proved it for K ? 7.

He showed that g(k) = 2k + l -2 where l is the largest natural number  ? (3/2)k   and hence computed the precise value of  g(6) = 73.

To read more about Subbayya Sivasankaranarayana Pillai Click  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subbayya_Sivasankaranarayana_Pillai 

Sandip Trivedi  is an Indian theoretical physicist working at Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR) at Mumbai, India, while he is its current Director. He is well known for his contributions to string theory, in particular finding (along with Renata Kallosh, Andrei Linde, and Shamit Kachru) the first models of accelerated expansion of the universe in low energy supersymmetric string. His research areas include string theory, cosmology and particle physics. He is now member of program advisory board of International Center for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS). He is also the recipient of the Infosys Prize 2010 in the category of Physical Sciences.

Fields

• Theoretical physics

Institutions

• Indian  Institute of Technology Kanpur


• California Institute of Technology


• Institute for Advanced Study


• TIFR

Notable awards

• Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award


• Infosys Prize


• TWAS Prize

To read more about Sandip Trivedi Click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandip_Trivedi 

Vashishtha Narayan Singh is an Indian mathematician from Basantpur, Bhojpur District, Bihar, India.

He was born on 2 April 1942 in Basantpur village of Bhojpur district in Bihar, India to Lal Bahadur Singh and Lahaso Devi. He received his primary and secondary education from Netarhat Residential School and college education from Patna Science College. Vashishtha Narayan Singh became a legend as a student when he was allowed by Patna University to appear in the two-year course of B.Sc. (Hons.) in Mathematics in its very first year. His achievements are still mentioned with a sense of pride by Netarhat Vidyalaya He received Ph.D. in Reproducing Kernels and Operators with a Cyclic Vector from University of California, Berkeley, in 1969. His doctoral advisor was John L. Kelley.

Field

• Mathematician

Known for

Reproducing Kernels and Operators with a Cyclic Vector

To know more about Vashishtha Narayan Singh Click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vashishtha_Narayan_Singh 

Har Gobind Khorana (9 January 1922 – 9 November 2011), was an Indian-American biochemist who shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for research that showed how the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code of the cell, control the cell’s synthesis of proteins. Khorana and Nirenberg were also awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in the same year.

Khorana was born in Raipur, British India (today Tehsil Kabirwala, Punjab, Pakistan) and later moved to become an Indian citizen after the partition of 1947. 

Fields 

• Molecular biology

Institutions

• MIT (1970–2007)


• University of Wisconsin, Madison (1960–70)


• University of British Columbia (1952–60)


• University of Cambridge (1950–52)


• Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (1948–49)

Notable awards

• Nobel Prize in Medicine (1968)


• Gairdner Foundation International Award (1980)


• Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize


• ForMemRS (1978)


• Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research


• Padma Vibhushan


• Willard Gibbs Award

 To read more about Har Gobind Khorana  Click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Har_Gobind_Khorana

Dr. Vasant Ranchhod Gowarikar (25 March 1933 – 2 January 2015) was an Indian scientist. He was the chief of Indian Space Research Organization and also the scientific advisor to the Prime Minister of India in 1991–1993.Gowarikar made valuable contributions to the fields of space research, weather and population. He was well known for his monsoon forecast model as he was the first scientist to develop an indigenous weather forecasting model that predicted the monsoon correctly.

Awards

• Gowarikar was awarded Padma Shri in 1984


• Padma Bhushan in 2008.


•  He also received the Fie Foundation Award.

Career

He had worked with the Indian Space Research Organization  Gowarikar was involved in space research in early career under Vikram Sarabhai when his office was in the building of the local St Mary Magdalene Church in Thumba in Kerala. He pioneered solid propellant development and later served as Director of the Vikram Sarabhai  Space Centre (VSSC) between 1979 and 1985.

Gowarikar also served as the scientific advisor to Prime Minister of India P.V. Narasimha Rao from 1991 to 1993. He had also been the Secretary of Department of Science and Technology.

He was appointed as Vice-Chancellor,Pune University and was chairman of the Marathi Vidnyan Parishad between 1994 and 2000. Gowarikar, along with his associates, also compiled The Fertilizer Encyclopedia (2008) that featured 4,500 entries detailing the chemical composition of fertilizers, and containing information on everything from their manufacturing and application to their economic and environmental considerations.

To read more about Vasant Gowarikar Click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasant_Gowarikar

• University of Rochester


• Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata

• Theoretical Physics

• William H.Riker University Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching (2006)


• Fulbright Fellowship (1997, 2006)


• Rockefeller Foundation Award (2004)


• Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator (1983-1989)


• Edward Peck Curtis Award (1991)

To know more about Ashok Das Click  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashok_Das 

Patcha Ramachandra Rao (21 March 1942 – 10 January 2010) was a metallurgist and administrator. He has the unique distinction of being the only Vice-Chancellor (2002–05) of the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) who was also a student (1963–68) and faculty (1964–92) at that institution. From 1992 to 2002, Rao was the Director of the National Metallurgical Laboratory Jamshedpur. After his tenure as Vice-Chancellor of B.H.U., in 2005, he took the reins of the Defence Institute of Advanced Technology (DIAT) as its first Vice-Chancellor. He was to serve DIAT until his superannuation in 2007. From 2007 till the end, Rao was a Raja Ramanna Fellow at the International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials, in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh.

Institutions

• Indian Institute of Technology (BHU)


• National Metallurgical Laboratory


• Defence Institute of Advanced Technology


• Indian Institute of Science, Osmania University?

Fields

• Metallurgy


• Material science


• Engineering

Awards

• Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (1985)


• National Metallurgist Award (2004)


• Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Gold Medal. INSA (2005)?

Honorary positions

·        President, The Asia-Pacific Academy of Materials (APAM), India Chapter

·        President, Indian Institute of Metals

·        Vice-President, Materials Research Society of India

·        Vice-President, Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi.

·        Sectional President, Materials Science Section, Indian Science Congress