Prof. Atish Dabholkar is the Director, Assistant Director General of International Centre for Theoretical Physics, UNESCO.
Prof. Dabholkar earned his Mmaster's degree in Physics from IIT Kanpur in 1985 and subsequently went on to earn his doctorate in theoretical physics from Princeton University in 1990 under the guidance of Jeffrey A. Harvey. After working as a postdoctoral associate at Rutgers University and Harvard University, he spent two years at the California Institute of Technology as a senior research fellow before returning to India to join as a professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research till 2010.
In collaboration with Jeffrey A. Harvey, Prof. Dabholkar identified a spectrum of supersymmetric states and initiated the study of supersymmetric solitons in string theory which played an important role in the discovery of duality symmetries in string theory and later in the study of quantum entropy of black holes. Prof. Dabholkar collaborated with Sameer Murthy and Don Zagier to discover a connection between the quantum entropy of black holes and the mathematics of mock modular forms by Ramanujan centuries ago. Prof. Dabholkar was the co-organizer of the Strings 2001 Conference held at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India.
He has also served as head of the ICTP's High Energy, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics section International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) and a Directeur de Recherche of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at Sorbonne University in the "Laboratoire de Physique Theorique et Hautes Energies" (LPTHE). Prof. Dabholkar was a visiting professor at Stanford University during 2003-04 and at CERN during 2012.
