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Who is Ajay Sood? Meet newly appointed Principal Scientific Adviser to the PM
Sood is a renowned Indian physicist, researcher and holder of 2 US and 5 Indian patents, was awarded the Padma Shri in 2013 for his stellar work in the field of science.
Ajay Sood, Honorary professor at the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru is the new Principal Scientific Adviser to the Prime Minister. Sood replaces K. Vijaya Raghavan, who retired recently.
Sood is a renowned Indian physicist, researcher and holder of 2 US and 5 Indian patents, was awarded the Padma Shri in 2013 for his stellar work in the field of science.
Known for his pioneering research findings on graphene and nanotechnology, he is a distinguished honorary Professor of Physics at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Born on 26 June 1951 in Gwalior, he completed his MS in Physics from Panjab University, Chandigarh in 1972, and did his PhD in Physics from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru in 1982.
Currently, Sood is a member of the Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council to the Prime Minister since 2018.
Research
Sood has done extensive research on hard condensed matter and soft condensed matter physics, with special emphasis on Raman scattering and nanotechnology. He has been credited with many path-breaking findings and inventions, which are said to be of daily and scientific use.
Through his experiments in 2003, he generated electrical signals by passing liquids over solids or through nanotubes and this phenomenon has now been termed by the scientific world as the Sood Effect.
Achievements and awards
After being a post-doctoral Max Planck Fellow at Max Planck Institute fur FKF, Stuttgart, Germany between 1983-85, Sood worked as a scientist at the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research at Kalpakkam in India before joining IISc. He has also been an honorary professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore since 1993.
Sood was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015. He has been on the Physical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2019. Sood has published over 290 research articles and papers in national and international peer-reviewed journals.
He has received over a dozen awards for multiple achievements from various institutions. The Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) recognised Sood's services by conferring on him the TWAS Prize in Physics, in 2000.
He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 1990, the National Award in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology by the Government of India, Nano Award by Government of Karnataka and Vigyan Ratan Award of Punjab University among many. He is one of the Executive Editors of an International journal, ‘Solid State Communications.
