Ramanath Cowsik

Prof Cowsik receiving the Padma Shri Award from the President of India. Ramanath Cowsik is an Indian astrophysicist and the James S. McDonnell Professor of Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He is considered by many as the father of astroparticle physics. A recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, Cowsik was honored by the Government of India, in 2002, with the fourth highest Indian civilian award of Padma Shri

Biography

Ramanath Cowsik was born in 1940 in the Western Indian state of Maharashtra. to secure the degree in physics in 1960, aged 19 present day Homi Bhabha National Institute, Trombay where he did a post graduate course. on deputation from TIFR, during the period from 1992 to 2003, as the Professor of Physics and Director. He is the James S. McDonnell Professor of Space Sciences of the institute since 2013.

Cowsik, who is known to be proficient in languages such as Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Sanskrit, English, German and French, Cowsik has two sons, Sasha and Aditya, and resides in the city of St. Louis.

Ramanath Cowsik is known for his theories related to the Big Bang origin of the universe. He argued that, post the Big Bang, gravitationally dominant relicts were formed from the particles with finite rest mass, resulting in the formation of halos of dark matter with galaxies embedded within. He postulated that this would limit the sums of masses of neutrinos, These theories are said to have explained the velocity dispersion of particles of dark matter and reproduced the luminosity profiles and ratified the rotation curves of galaxies. for the observation of optical and infrared wavelength bands of cosmic rays magazine, in their selection of 1000 most important scientific papers of the century. and ResearchGate, an online repository has listed 193 of them. on astrophysics and the relationship between religion and science. He has also assisted other scientists in ratifying their experiments by acting as a reference point; his involvement in the OPERA experiment, a CERN, Geneva and the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, Gran Sasso collaboration was one such instance.

Awards and recognitions Ramanath Cowsik is an elected Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, Indian Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, India, Indian Geophysical Union and The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World. He is also a recipient of TWAS Prize and the ISCA S. N. Bose Birth Centenary Award and has delivered the Sir C. V. Raman Memorial Award Lecture (1996) and the Jawaharlal Nehru Birth Centenary Award Lecture (2002).