Ashoke Sen

Ashoke Sen is an Indian theoretical physicist and distinguished professor at the HarishChandra Research Institute, Allahabad He also is the Morningstar Visiting professor at MIT His main area of work is String Theory He was among the first recipients of the Fundamental Physics Prize for opening the path to the realisation that all string theories are different limits of the same underlying theory This richly endowed prize has been set up by the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner for rewarding scientific breakthroughs Ashoke Sen was the only recipient from Asia of this inaugural prize
He was born in Calcutta, and is the elder son of Anil Kumar Sen, a former professor of physics at the Scottish Church College, and Gouri Sen, a homemaker After completing his schooling from the Sailendra Sircar Vidyalaya in Kolkata, he earned his bachelors of science degree in 1975 from the Presidency College under the University of Calcutta, and his masters three years later from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur He did his doctoral work in physics at Stony Brook UniversityAshoke Sen made a number of major original contributions to the subject of string theory, including his landmark paper on strongweak coupling duality or Sduality, which was influential in changing the course of research in the field He pioneered the study of unstable Dbranes 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 coauthored 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 His contributions include the entropy function formalism for extremal black holes and its applications to attractors His current research interests are centered around the attractor mechanism and the precision counting of microstates of black holes