Dr. Atish Dabholkar, an Indian theoretical physicist, currently serves as the Director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) with the rank of Assistant Director-General, UNESCO.
Dr. Dabholkar did his integrated five years MSc in Physics from IIT Kanpur in 1985 and he subsequently went on to earn his doctorate in theoretical physics from Princeton University in 1990. Harvey. After working as a postdoctoral associate at Rutgers University and harvard University, he spent two years at California Institute of Technology as a senior research fellow before returning to India to join as a professor at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research till 2010. Dr. Dabholkar was appointed as Director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in 2019. He has also served as head of 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 Universites in the "Laboratoire de Physique Theorique et Hautes Energies" (LPTHE). Dr. Dabholkar was a visiting professor at Stanford University during 2003-04 and at CERN during 2012.
Dr. Dabholkar is well-renowned in the fields of string theory and quantum black holes, including investigations that build on ICTP founder Abdus Salam's Nobel-winning work on electroweak unification.
Dr. Dabholkar has received many honours, including the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 2006 for his "outstanding contributions for establishing how quantum theory modifies the entropy of black holes and his pioneering studies of supersymmetric solitons in string theory". He is an elected member of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and in 2007 received the Chair of Excellence award from the National Research Agency (ANR) in France.
