Ashoke Sen wins 2026 Oskar Klein Medal

UPDATE - follow-up to Award-winning theoretical physicist Ashoke Sen has focused on string theory: Theoretical physicist Ashoke Sen has won the 2026 Oskar Klein Medal, becoming the first Indian laureate to receive the honour from Stockholm University and the Nobel Committee for Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Achievements and Lectures

Dr. Sen is the ICTS-Infosys Madhava Chair Professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in Bengaluru. He delivered the memorial lecture accompanying the Medal in Stockholm on October 22, titled 'Gravity from Strings and Strings from Gravity'. His past work includes helping link string equations to physical field equations in the 1980s, showing the equivalence of force descriptions called S-duality in the 1990s, and proposing the Sen conjectures in 1999. He has also studied black hole entropy to connect microscopic states with macroscopic traits.

Background and Awards

Dr. Sen graduated from Presidency College in Kolkata, studied at IIT-Kanpur, and earned his PhD from Stony Brook University in 1982. He has worked at TIFR in Mumbai and the Harish-Chandra Research Institute in Prayagraj before moving to ICTS in 2021. His prior honours include the S.S. Bhatnagar Prize, the Infosys Prize, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Dirac Medal, the Padma Shri, and the Padma Bhushan. U.S. physicist Edward Witten praised his work on duality and subatomic interactions in a 2014 interview.

Context

The Oskar Klein Medal honours the Swedish physicist Oskar Klein, who explored unifying electromagnetism and gravity through extra dimensions in 1926. India maintains a strong community of string theorists across institutions like TIFR, ICTS, HRI, and IISER Pune, with members such as Nabamita Banerjee, Shiraz Minwalla, Sunil Mukhi, P. Ramadevi, and Spenta Wadia.