Charusita Chakravarty

Charusita Chakravarty (5 May 1964 – 29 March 2016) She was an Associate Member of the Centre for Computational Material Science, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, 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, 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. 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. 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: 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) 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.