Sriram Ramaswamy

Sriram Rajagopal Ramaswamy (born 10 November 1957) is an Indian physicist. He is a professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and previously the director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) Centre for Interdisciplinary Sciences in Hyderabad.

Education Ramaswamy completed high school at the Modern School, Barakhamba Road, New Delhi, and then moved to the University of Maryland where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics with high honours in 1977. He completed postdoctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania. governing the alignment, flow, mechanics and statistical properties of suspensions of self-propelled creatures, on scales from a cell to the ocean. Key predictions—that macroscopically aligned flocks of swimming bacteria are impossible, and that the addition of swimmers to a fluid can make the viscosity arbitrarily small—have been confirmed in recent experiments. His insight into nonliving imitations of self-propulsion has led to design principles for chemotactic colloids, the first experiments observing giant number fluctuations in flocks, and the creation of flocks with a tiny minority of motile constituents.

Awards and honours Among the awards he has received for his research are the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2000 and the Infosys Prize for Physical Sciences in 2011. He also served on the Physical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2014. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016.

He was awarded one of the H K Firodia awards for 2016. He was elected an International Member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2025.