Mumbai: Professor Jainendra K. Jain, a Rajasthan-born theoretical physicist, has become the first Indian to receive the prestigious Wolf Prize in Physics. The award was presented to Jain by Israeli President Isaac Herzog at a ceremony in the Knesset on June 18.
Jain, who grew up in Sambhar, a small town on the edge of the Thar Desert in Rajasthan, is the founding director of the newly established Lodha Theoretical Physics Institute (LTPI) and serves as the Evan Pugh University Professor and Eberly Family Chair in Physics at Pennsylvania State University, USA.
Jain made the award-winning breakthrough in 1989 as a young postdoctoral scholar at Yale University. His pioneering work on composite fermions has become a central concept in modern condensed matter physics.
Growing up in rural Rajasthan, Jain was fascinated by physics. He overcame a life-threatening accident at the age of 12 to pursue his passion for physics, earning degrees from Maharaja College in Jaipur, IIT Kanpur, and Stony Brook University in New York.
Jain has co-authored over 250 scientific articles and a monograph, Composite Fermions, published in 2007 by Cambridge University Press. He is also a recipient of several honours, including the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society and election to the United States National Academy of Sciences.
Jain's vision also extends to India through LTPI, where he is helping build the country's first fully privately funded centre dedicated to fundamental research in theoretical physics.
