N. V. Madhusudana

Nelamangala Vedavyasachar Madhusudana (born 9 May 1944) is an Indian physicist and an emeritus scientist at Raman Research Institute. Known for his research on liquid crystals, Madhusudhana is an elected fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences and Indian National Science Academy. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to physical sciences in 1989.

Biography

Nelamangala Madhusudana was born on 9 May 1944 at Mysore, in the south Indian state of Karnataka, to N. Vedavyasachar and Indira Bai. After early schooling in Mysore, he earned a graduate degree in science in 1962, which he followed up with a master's degree in physics in 1964, both degrees from the University of Mysore.

Subsequently, he joined Raman Research Institute as a scientist and served the institution for two and a half decades. During this period, he became an associate professor in 1977, a professor in 1986, and headed the Liquid Crystals Laboratory of the institute during 1999–2000. After serving as a dean of research from 2001, he superannuated from regular service in 2006, holding the position. Post-retirement, he continued his association with the institute as a senior scientist of the Indian National Science Academy until 2011, and has been serving as an emeritus scientist since that time. He also served as a Jawaharlal Nehru chair professor at the School of Physics of the University of Hyderabad on a month-long assignment in December 2009.

Legacy Schematic of alignment in the smectic phases. The smectic A phase (left) has molecules organized into layers. In the smectic C phase (right), the molecules are tilted inside the layers. Mudhusudana's research has been focusing on the physical studies of liquid crystals. He demonstrated for the first time the electromechanical coupling effects of cholesteric liquid crystals and the suppression induced by curvature in the Smectic-A phase of the crystals. He suggested an explanation for the anti-parallel correlations of near-neighbor molecules and apolar director of highly polar compounds as well as for the nematic to nematic and smectic-A to smectic-A reentrant phase transitions. and the online article repository of Indian Academy of Sciences has listed 160 of them. Besides, he has contributed chapters to books published by others and his work has drawn citations from other scientists.

Mudhusudana assisted his mentor, S. Chandrasekhar, in founding the Liquid Crystal Laboratory at Raman Research Institute. Indian Journal of Physics of Springer and the Indian Journal of Pure and Applied Physics of the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources as a member of their editorial boards. He is also a former editorial board member of "International Journal of Engineering Science" and "Liquid Crystals" journal. He served as the co-director of one of the seminars on soft condensed matter organized by International Centre for Theoretical Physics and chaired a session of the "Indian Statistical Physics Community Meeting" of 2014 where he delivered a keynote address. He also served as a member of the international scientific committee of the first Asian Conference on Liquid Crystals (ACLC2012) held in Yamanashi, Japan in 2012.

Awards and honors The Indian Academy of Sciences elected Madhusudana as their fellow in 1974. He received the Superconductivity and Materials Science Prize of the Materials Research Society of India in 2000, the same year as he became a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy. The award orations delivered by him include Savadatti Endowment lecture of Karnataka University Teachers Forum and Annual Lecture of the Bangalore chapter of Royal Chemical Society, both in 1999, Professor Kishore Memorial lecture of Indian Institute of Science in 2003, and Prof. Prakash P. Karat Endowment lecture of 2012.

Selected bibliography Chapters

Articles