Sunil Mukhi earned his BSc (1976) from St Xavier's College, University of Bombay and PhD (1981) in Theoretical Physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. After spending two years at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) at Trieste, Italy, as a post-doctoral Fellow, he returned to India to join the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai (1984). He moved to IISER Pune in 2012 as Coordinator, Physics Programme. He spent a sabbatical year each at CERN, Geneva and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and has been invited as a Visiting Fellow Commoner to Trinity College, Cambridge. He was one of the organisers of the six-month `Branes in String and M-theory' programme held at the Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge in 2012.

Academic and Research Achievements: Mukhi's major research deals with fundamental properties of string theories, and include the conformal invariance of supersymmetric two-dimensional field theories which describe the world-sheet dynamics of strings, the study of supersymmetric solitons using index theorems, the discovery of a new duality between string theory and M-theory, the identification of string networks as supersymmetric states, the description of D-brane decays via noncommutative tachyons and the formulation of M2-brane world-volume field theory. He has co-authored a textbook on Advanced Mathematical Methods for Physicists with Prof. N. Mukunda and a Physics Reports volume on Membranes in M-theory, and edited three Conference Proceedings. Mukhi has guided 5 PhD students.

Other Contributions: Mukhi was the first Dean of Graduate Studies at TIFR and played an important role in setting up the Deemed University structure there. He has been a Member of several national committees including the Programme Advisory Committee and the Standing Committee on Ethics of the Indian Academy of Sciences. Mukhi has been an invited speaker at the international conferences 'Strings 2000' in Michigan, 'Strings 2002' in Cambridge and `Strings 2008' in Geneva, and was one of the organizers of 'Strings 2001' in Mumbai. He has been on the Editorial Board of the Journal of High Energy Physics since its inception.

Awards and Honours: Mukhi is a recipient of the SS Bhatnagar Award (1999) and JC Bose Fellowship (2008). He is also a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore and The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS).