Ashoke Sen

Ashoke Sen FRS (; born 1956) is an Indian theoretical physicist and ICTS-Infosys Madhava Chair Professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bangalore. he is also an honorary fellow in National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER) India. He is also a Morningstar Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a distinguished professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study. His main area of work is string theory. He was among the first recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics "for opening the path to the realization that all string theories are different limits of the same underlying theory".

Early life He was born on 15 July 1956 in Kolkata, and is the elder son of Anil Kumar Sen, a former professor of physics at the Scottish Church College, Kolkata, and Gouri Sen, a homemaker.

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

Career Ashoke Sen made a number of major original contributions to the subject of string theory, including his landmark paper on strong-weak coupling duality or S-duality, which was influential in changing the course of research in the field. He pioneered the study of unstable D-branes and made the famous Sen conjecture about open string tachyon condensation on such branes. His description of rolling tachyons has been influential in string cosmology. He has also co-authored many important papers on string field theory.

In 1998, he won the fellowship of the Royal Society on being nominated by the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. He is currently serving as a distinguished professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bangalore where he is working on string theory. His specific research interests include S-duality, tachyon condensation, black hole entropy and superstring perturbation theory.

Honors and awards ICTP Prize in 1989 Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1991 Fellow of the Royal Society 1998 Padma Shri in 2001 Infosys Prize in the Mathematical Sciences, 2009 Fundamental Physics Prize, 2012, for his work on string theory M.P. Birla Memorial Award in 2013 Dirac Medal in 2014

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