Rahul Pandit - Biography#

Rahul Pandit, FASc, FNA, FTWAS, Fellow American Physical Society, National Science Chair, obtained a 5-year-integrated MS in Physics from IIT Delhi (1972 - 1977), his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (1977 - 1981), and was then a Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University (1981 - 1983). Since 1984, he has been at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, where he is now an Honorary Professor and National Science Chair.

Rahul Pandit has made important contributions of lasting value to an astonishingly wide variety of challenging and fundamental problems in turbulence, mathematical models for cardiac tissue, and the statistical physics and nonlinear dynamics of condensed-matter and complex systems. His papers have appeared in leading international journals. He has received several awards and recognitions for his research, served on the editorial boards of important journals and on various committees; e.g., he is a recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award (Physics) and is an elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, The World Academy of Sciences, and the American Physical Society; he has served as the Chair of the C3 Commission (Statistical Physics) of the IUPAP, and as an elected Vice President on the Executive Council of the IUPAP; and he has served as a Divisional Associate Editor for Physical Review Letters.

He has been invited to lecture on his work at leading conferences and universities all over the world; and he has helped to organise several important meetings at the International Centre of Theoretical Sciences (Bangalore, India), the Isaac Newton Institute (Cambridge, UK), the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics (Stony Brook, USA), and StatPhys meetings of the IUPAP.

He has mentored 38 PhD students and several postdoctoral fellows, many of whom now occupy senior academic positions at institutes and universities in India and several other countries. He has established active and fruitful joint research collaborations with leading scientists all over the world, expecially in France (the Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur, Universite Cote d’Azur, and ENS Paris), Sweden (NORDITA, Stockholm), the UK (Imperial College), and Japan (Kyoto University and the National Institute of Fusion Science). He has played an important role in enhancing joint research between Indian and European institutes, by virtue of his research collaborations and also as part of Indo-French and EU projects.

He has made pioneering contributions to (a) the statistical mechanics of wetting and multilayer adsorption, (b) the scaling properties of quasiperiodic Schroedinger operators, (c) hysteresis, (d) oil-water-surfactant mixtures, (e) Bose-Hubbard models, (f) the statistics of turbulence in fluids, plasmas, complex and active fluids, (g) mathematical models for cardiac tissue and life-threatening ventricular arrhythmias, and (h) the application of AI-ML techniques to these fields.