Sunanda Banerjee earned his BSc degree from Calcutta University (Presidency College, Kolkata) and joined the M Phil course of London University in Imperial College. He worked with Dr DB Miller in the High Energy Nuclear Physics Group in a K+d experiment at the Rutherford Laboratory looking for exotic resonances (now called penta-quarks). He obtained his PhD degree from University of London and Diploma of Imperial College in 1976. He did his post-doctoral work at Imperial College (1975-77). He joined Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai in 1978 and subsequently visited Karlsruhe (1981-82) and spent several years at CERN, Geneva, working on the L3/CMS experiments (1986-90, 1996-97, 2003-2004).

Academic and Research Achievements: During his postdoctoral days Dr Banerjee worked with two experiments: (i) Search for charm hadrons in anti-proton/proton experiment at 12 GeV/c and (ii) Neutrino (also anti-neutrino)-nucleon experiment with narrow band beams from CERN SPS. There was no evidence of charm production in the anti-proton experiment, but a strange narrow structure was reported there. The neutrino experiment gave him the first quantitative evidence of QCD-logarithmic violation of scaling (in Nachtman moments). At TIFR he worked on a variety of bubble chamber experiments with many different hadron beams. Study of polarization of strange baryons, production and decay properties of a number of resonances were some of the high lights of his findings. He studied the properties of gluon and basic structure of strong interaction dynamics. One of the key findings was the understanding of the inherent uncertainty in the measurement of strong coupling constant. At TIFR, he worked with hybrid spectrometers in studying the properties of charmed hadrons and then joined the L3 experiment at the large electron-positron (LEP) collider at CERN. He worked with the LEP data in establishing the running of the strong coupling constants, in the precise determination of the Electroweak Standard Model parameters and in the search of supersymmetric partners of leptons. He led the EHEP group in the Belle experiment at KEK, which looked for high precision measurement of b-quark decays leading to the observation of CP violation in b-quark sector. He also joined the CMS experiment at CERN, which is getting ready to collect data from proton-proton collision at the Large Hadron collider. He has guided seven students for their PhD degree.

Other Contributions: Dr Banerjee's software expertise has helped him in building facilities in many of the places where he worked. He built a facility for measuring Bubble Chamber films with online geometry control at Imperial College. He was one of the main architects for the offline software for the L3 experiment and his expertise has been used at CERN and at IHEP, Beijing for building software packages of high-energy experiments.

Awards and Honours: Sunanda Banerjee was selected as a Young Associate of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore in 1986. He was later elected a Fellow (2002) there.