Infosys Science Foundation Organizes a Public Lecture on “Extreme Light, Extreme States”

The Infosys Science Foundation (ISF), in association with the Mahatma Gandhi University, today organized a public lecture on “Extreme Light, Extreme States”by Prof. G. Ravindra Kumar, Senior Professor, Department of Nuclear and Atomic Physics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai.The interactive session was well attended by undergraduate students from the university.

This lecture is part of the ‘Infosys Science Foundation Lectures, a series of public talks by jurors and laureates of the Infosys Prize which has been developed with an aim to popularize science and research in the country. Prof. Ravindra Kumar, who was the winner of Infosys Prize 2015 for Physical Sciences, is the first speaker in the current years’ series of public talks organized by the Foundation.

Prof. Ravindra Kumar’s talk highlighted factors such as high intensity, ultrashort light pulses that are revolutionizing science in exciting ways. Some basic research themes and results of experiments performed at TIFR on the subject were presented as part of the lecture.

Prof. Gattamraju Ravindra Kumar holds a B.E. (Hons) in Mechanical Engineering and M.Sc. (Hons) in Physics, both from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, in Rajasthan, India. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Physics in IIT-Kanpur in 1990. After a year of postdoctoral work, in 1992, he joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, in the group now known as UPHILL (Ultra-short Laser Pulse High Intensity Laser Laboratory) in the Department of Atomic and Molecular Physics. At TIFR, he has established a strong laboratory for studying the physics of hot dense matter produced by ultra-short laser pulses. He is now a Senior Professor at TIFR, and a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy.

About the Infosys Science Foundation

The Infosys Prize is awarded under the aegis of the Infosys Science Foundation, a not-for-profit trust instituted in February 2009. The Infosys Science Foundation is funded by a corpus which today stands at over INR 140 Crore (USD 20 million), contributed by the former Board of Directors and senior management at Infosys.

For more information on the winners, please visit www.infosys-science-foundation.com.