Sen received his PhD from Stony Brook University. During his early career, he worked as a research scientist at Fermilab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Later, he joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research before finally moving to the Harish-Chandra Research Institute where he currently works.

Academic and Research Achievements: Ashoke Sen is among India's most famous theoretical physicists. He has made a number of major original contributions to the subject of string theory, including his landmark paper on strong-weak coupling duality or S-duality, which was influential in changing the course of research in the field. He pioneered the study of unstable D-branes and made the famous Sen conjecture about open string tachyon condensation on such branes. His description of rolling tachyons has been influential in string cosmology. He has authored (and co-authored) many important papers on string field theory. One of his most recent contributions include the entropy function formalism for extremal black holes and its applications to attractors. His current research interests are centered around the attractor mechanism and the precision counting of microstates for black holes in string theory. Of his nearly 200 research papers, as many as 47 papers have over 100 citations each.

Awards and Honours: Sen was awarded the ICTP Prize (1989) in memory of Hideki Yukawa, the SS Bhatnagar Award (1994) and the Padma Shri (2001). He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (1998) and the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore.