HONOUR FOR MALAYALI SCIENTISTS

HONOUR FOR MALAYALI SCIENTISTS

Two scientists from Kerala are among the three Indians who have won The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) prizes in 2013 under various disciplines. Each year, the Academy, based in Trieste, Italy, presents nine prizes of 15,000 US dollars each to individual scientists who have been working and living in a developing country for at least ten year .Rajesh Gopakumar of Harish-Chandra Research Institute in Allahabad and A Ajayaghosh of the National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology (NIIST) in Thiruvananthapuram are the two Malayali scientists who have won the coveted award in Physics and Chemistry categories.

The Engineering Sciences Prize was won by Indranil Manna of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh.While Rajesh and Ajayaghosh shared the award with scientists from Brazil and Taiwan, Manna shared the award with a scientist from Jordan.  All the three shared awards carrying a cash component of Rs 4.5 lakh each and a plaque.According to TWAS, Rajesh was honoured ‘’for his discovery of duality symmetry between a class of two-dimensional conformal field theories and higher-spin theory in three-dimensional anti-de Sitter space.’’The 46-year-old scientist, whose family hails from Thiruvananthapuram, obtained his integrated MSc degree in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1992. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1997. After a few years as a research associate at Harvard University, Rajesh joined HRI in 2001. He was also a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, from 2001-2004.

The award was given to Ajayaghosh for his ‘’fundamental contribution to the understanding of the self-assembly of linear pi-systems to supramolecular architectures with diverse shape, size and properties, leading to a new class of soft functional materials.’’The 52-year-old scientist, who hails from Vellimon in Kollam, had won the 2012 Infosys Prize in physical sciences.He has also won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for the year 2007 and the Thomson Reuters Science Citation award for the year 2009 for his research on fluorescent molecular assemblies. TWAS honoured Manna was for his ‘’outstanding contributions in establishing microstructure property correlations in nanometric materials.’’

Prof. John Kurakar