Prof. Abhay Lalit Despande currently serves as a professor at Stony Brook University, State University of New York with a joint appointment with Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL).
Prof. Deshpande received his master's degree in Physics from IIT Kanpur in 1987 and subsequently went on to earn his doctorate in Experimental High Energy Physics from Yale University in 1995. He is a faculty at the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Stony Brook University, USA. For his research, he is involved in experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab). In the past, he has also performed experiments at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, and at DESY in Hamburg, Germany. He was one of the earliest promoters of the Electron-Ion Collider. Since 2017, he has served as the Founding Director at the Center for Frontiers in Nuclear Science, and Scientific Director for the Electron-Ion Collider being built at Brookhaven National Laboratory. As Electron-Ion Collider Director of Science, he helps develop and enhance the scientific scope of the US Electron-Ion Collider. At the Center for Frontiers in Nuclear Science, he leads the activities that promote science and international collaborations for the EIC through collaborative research and mentoring exceptional postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. The Center runs an annual series of international workshops on the science of EIC, a robust postdoctoral fellowship program, a seminar series, a visitors' program, and an annual summer school associated with the science of EIC. His research interests are in the fields of particle and nuclear physics and in particular, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), Precision Electro-Weak & Beyond the Standard Model Physics, and Science Communication and Innovation in Physics.
Prof. Deshpande is the recipient of many prestigious awards and honors, such as the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence Research & Innovation in 2018; RIKEN (Japan) President's Special Prize for the Study of Nucleon Spin in 2015; Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2014; National Academy of Science's Education Fellow in Life Sciences in 2013. He is the recipient of the prestigious IITK Distinguished Alumnus Award, 2021.
