Researchers Who Return to India Nurture Talent

I am a scientist conducting research in string theory, quantum gravity and related topics in theoretical physics.

- RAGHU MAHAJAN

I lived in Chandigarh until the end of Class 12 and spent two years as an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi before transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and arriving in Cambridge, Massachusetts in August 2008. After spending 16 years abroad, in August 2024, I returned to India as a faculty member at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), a research institute established in 2007 and located in north Bengaluru.

Flourishing Tradition

India has had a disproportionate impact on the development and advancement of string theory. It can be reasonably argued that contributions to the subject from Indian researchers working in India, taken as a whole, are second only to those of string theorists working in the US. A shining example is Ashoke Sen, formerly at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute (HRI) in Allahabad and now my colleague at ICTS. He was the inaugural recipient of the $3mn Breakthrough Prize in 2012 for “opening the path to the realisation that all string theories are different limits of the same underlying theory”.

The thriving culture of string theory research in India has been nurtured over the past four decades by a steady flow of researchers trained abroad who returned to work in India with a definite aim of teaching and training new students and advancing the subject while working in India. This is perhaps one of the healthiest forms of patriotism.