Probir Roy got his BSc (1962) from Presidency College, Calcutta University. He then studied at King's College, Cambridge University, earned MA (Cantab) in 1965. Afterwards, he obtained his PhD from Stanford University in 1968 for studies on K-meson physics under the supervision of SM Berman. He carried out postdoctoral research for three years at Cornell University working with T Kinoshita and Ken Wilson on deep inelastic processes and short-distance scale invariance. Subsequently, he spent a year at CERN, Geneva, working on weak interactions. After returning to India in 1972, Roy joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai and was made a regular academic staff member soon thereafter. He has been Visiting Professor at Oxford University, University of Texas at Austin, University of California at Riverside, University of Hawaii at Manoa and University of Helsinki as well as Institute of Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara. He retired from TIFR in 2007 and worked for five years at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, as DAE Raja Ramanna Fellow. Currently, he is INSA Senior Scientist at CAPSS, Bose Institute. 

Academic and Research Achievements: While at TIFR, he led a group of students to study deep inelastic processes and two-dimensional field theory. A new sum-rule for polarized photon-photon collision into hadrons was invented and the U(n)-symmetric Thirring Model was solved explicitly. During 1980s and 1990s, he studied supersymmetry and supergravity, deriving a new upper bound on the gaugino-gravitino mass ratio and proposed novel signals for R-parity breaking with leptons produced in an e+e- collider. He also worked on neutrino physics and was instrumental in highlighting the capability of the proposed detector at the Indian Neutrino Observatory. He guided five PhD students and also mentored ten post-docs. He has authored over 130 research articles and two books, apart from editing several published volumes.

Other Contributions: At TIFR, Roy chaired the Physics Graduate School (1992-97) and the Department of Theoretical Physics (1997-2002).

Awards and Honours: Professor Roy was awarded the SS Bhatanagr Prize for Physical Sciences (1987), INSA/Royal Society Exchange Fellowship (1994), Meghnad Saha Lectureship (1997), and DAE Raja Ramanna Fellowship (2007). He was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, and National Academy of Sciences (India), Allahabad. He also served as President of the Indian Physical Society, Kolkata.