Gopakumar Rajesh

Gopakumar is Senior Prof. and Director of the Int. Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS-TIFR) in Bengaluru, India. He was previously Prof. at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute (HRI), Allahabad, India. He did his undergraduate studies at IIT-Kanpur and obtained his Phd in 1997 under the supervision of David Gross at Princeton U., USA. After a research associateship at Harvard U. he returned to India to work at HRI. His work has aimed to understand the origin of gauge-string dualities. He is known for the Gopakumar-Vafa duality as well as the Gopakumar-Vafa invariants. His work with Gaberdiel on the duals to minimal model CFTs has also been very influential. He is the recipient of the ICTP Prize, S. S. Bhatnagar award, G. D. Birla Award, TWAS Prize in Physical Sciences, J. C. Bose Fellowship among other awards. He is a member of all three Indian science academies as well as a founding member-alumnus of the Global Young Academy.