05 May Sriram Ramaswamy elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society
Prof. Sriram Ramaswamy of the TIFR Centre for Interdisciplinary Sciences in Hyderabad has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, the oldest scientific society of the world. Prof. Ramaswamy has now been inducted into a select group of intellectuals which included Sir Issac Newton, Bertrand Russell, S. Ramanujan, Sir J. C. Bose and others.
The citation for Prof. Ramaswamy reads:
Sriram Ramaswamy is a theoretician with broad interests in nonequilibrium, soft-matter and biological physics. His research helped found the field of Active Matter, which studies the collective behavior of objects, such as motile organisms, that convert local energy input into autonomous motion.
He is widely known for formulating the hydrodynamic equations governing the alignment, flow, mechanics and statistical properties of suspensions of self-propelled creatures, on scales from a cell to the ocean. Key predictions — that macroscopically aligned flocks of swimming bacteria are impossible, and that the addition of swimmers to a fluid can make the viscosity arbitrarily small — have been confirmed in recent experiments. His insight into nonliving imitations of self-propulsion has led to design principles for chemotactic colloids, the first experiments observing giant number fluctuations in flocks, and the creation of flocks with a tiny minority of motile constituents.
Sriram directs the TIFR Centre for Interdisciplinary Sciences in Hyderabad, on leave from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Among the awards he has received for his research are the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (2000) and the Infosys Prize (2011).
Prof. Ramaswamy’s Homepage at IISc Bangalore
Prof. Ramaswamy’s Page at TIFR
Managing Editor of the English Section, Gonit Sora and Research Associate, Cardiff University, UK.
