Ashoke Sen
Sen in the Physics department ofScottish Church College in 2019
Born	(1956-07-15)15 July 1956 (age 69) Kolkata, West Bengal, India
Alma mater	Presidency College, Kolkata (BSc) IIT Kanpur (MSc) Stony Brook University (PhD)
Known for	Contributions tostring field theory S-duality Sen Conjecture
Spouse	Sumathi Rao
Awards	G.D. Birla Award for Scientific Research (1996) TWAS Prize (1997) Padma Shri (2001) Infosys Prize - Mathematical Sciences (2009) Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2012) Padma Bhushan (2013) Dirac Medal (2014)
Scientific career
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Fermilab Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Harish-Chandra Research Institute Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal
Doctoral advisor	George Sterman
Website	home.icts.res.in/~sen/

Ashoke SenFRS (/əˈʃoʊksɛn/; born 1956) is an Indiantheoretical physicist and ICTS-Infosys Madhava Chair Professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bangalore.^[1] A former Distinguished Professor at theHarish-Chandra Research Institute,Prayagraj,^[2] He is also an honorary fellow inNational Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER) India.^[3] He is also a Morningstar Visiting Professor at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Distinguished Professor at theKorea Institute for Advanced Study. His main area of work isstring theory. He was among the first recipients of theBreakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics "for opening the path to the realization that all string theories are different limits of the same underlying theory".^[4]

He was born on 15 July 1956^[5] in Kolkata, and is the elder son of Anil Kumar Sen, a former professor of physics at theScottish Church College, Kolkata, and Gouri Sen, ahomemaker.^[6]

After completing his schooling fromSailendra Sircar Vidyalaya inKolkata, he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1975 from thePresidency College under theUniversity of Calcutta, and his master's a year later from theIndian Institute of Technology Kanpur. During his undergraduate studies at Presidency, he was greatly inspired by the work and teaching ofAmal Kumar Raychaudhuri. He did his doctoral work in physics atStony Brook University.

Ashoke Sen made a number of major original contributions to the subject ofstring theory, including his landmark paper on strong-weak coupling duality orS-duality,^[7] which was influential in changing the course of research in the field. He pioneered the study of unstableD-branes and made the famousSen conjecture aboutopen stringtachyon condensation on such branes.^[8] His description of rolling tachyons^[9] has been influential instring cosmology. He has also co-authored many important papers onstring field theory.

In 1998, he won the fellowship of theRoyal Society on being nominated by the theoretical physicistStephen Hawking.^[2] His contributions include the entropy function formalism for extremal black holes and its applications to attractors. His important works include the attractor mechanism and the precision counting of microstates of black holes, and new developments in string perturbation theory. He joined theNational Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER) India as an Honorary Professor in the School of Physical Sciences.^[3] In the year 2020, he joinedIndian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal (IISER Bhopal), Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India as a visiting/adjunct professor in the Department of Physics.^[10] He is currently serving as a distinguished professor at theInternational Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bangalore where he is working on string theory. His specific research interests includeS-duality,tachyon condensation,black hole entropy and superstring perturbation theory.^{[1][better source needed]}

• ICTP Prize in 1989^[11]
• Fellow of theIndian Academy of Sciences in 1991^[5]
• S.S. Bhatnagar award in 1994
• TWAS Prize 1997^[12]
• Fellow of the Royal Society 1998^[2]
• Fellow of theIndian National Science Academy in 1996^[13]
• Padma Shri in 2001^[14]
• Infosys Prize in theMathematical Sciences, 2009^[15]
• Fundamental Physics Prize, 2012, for his work on string theory^[16][17][4]
• Padma Bhushan in 2013^[18]
• M.P. Birla Memorial Award in 2013
• Dirac Medal in 2014^[19]

• 
  Sen and Prof. Sumathi Rao with students at Harish-Chandra Research Institute, 2018

Scholia has a profile forAshoke Sen(Q726244).

• Home page
• Ashoke Sen CV
• "Thomson Honours Leading Indian Scientists"Archived 12 March 2007 at theWayback Machine
• The Hindu, Sunday, January 7, 2001: "Stringing together the ultimate law"
• "Profile of Top 25 scientists in India".India Today. 11 September 2011. Retrieved4 September 2019.

Media related toAshoke Sen (physicist) at Wikimedia Commons

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