Praveen Chaddah did his BSc and MSc from St Stephen's College, Delhi University. He joined the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) Training School in 1973 and worked for his PhD while in BARC. He did his post-doctoral work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Academic and Research Achievements: Chaddah's PhD work involved setting-up of Compton Profile Spectrometer with a gamma-ray source, the first in India, for Electron Momentum Density measurements. His work focused on electronic states in structurally disordered materials and on electron correlation effects. At Illinois he initiated measurements of nuclear momentum densities in the quantum solid helium-4. This was one of the first experiments exploiting the epithermal energy spectrum of the spallation neutron source IPNS at Argonne National Lab. He also worked on correlating the superconducting and martensitic transitions in A-15 superconductors. After returning to India, he worked on the development of superconducting magnets and of multi-filamentary NbTi wires at BARC during 1982-87. He made important contribution to the development and expansion of Bean's Critical State model and introduced the minimum flux change hypothesis as a reformulation of Bean's model. Chaddah works on first order phase transitions in vortex matter and also in various magnetic materials. His emphasis has been on understanding metastabilities associated with supercooling and superheating, as also those associated with glass-like arrest of kinetics. His recent work on magnetic field-induced first order transitions has shown tunability of coexisting phases with special relevance to half doped manganites.

Awards and Honours: Dr Praveen Chaddah received the INSA Medal for Young Scientists (1978) and MRSI-ICSC Prize for Superconductivity (1993). He was elected a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore (1993) and the National Academy of Sciences (India), Allahabad (2007).