Sharika Nandan Kaul obtained his MSc (1969), DIIT (1970) (Postgraduate Diploma) and PhD degrees (1974) in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur. He worked as a Scientific Officer in Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory, Hyderabad, before joining the Materials Science Programme at IIT Kanpur as a Research Scientist. He spent 6 years (1979-84) in Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and Scientific Collaborator at Ruhr University, Bochum and as a Max-Planck Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Metal Research, Stuttgart. Professor Kaul has served as the Chairman (Dean) of the School of Physics at the University of Hyderabad (2000-03) and has held several visiting positions abroad.

Academic and Research Achievements: On returning to India in 1984, Kaul established a research laboratory and a research group at the University of Hyderabad. He has made seminal contributions to the areas of research such as magnetism, galvanomagnetic transport, phase transitions and critical phenomena in spin systems with or without quenched disorder; spin glasses and reentrant spin systems; percolation in dilute magnetic systems; electron-electron interactions and quantum interference effects in disordered systems; ferromagnetic shape memory effects; magnetically-mediated superconductivity and magnetism in low-dimensional systems. He has published over 200 research articles in peer-reviewed journals, contributed invited chapters in Lecture Notes on Physics and Handbook of Magnetism. He has mentored more than 30 MPhil and PhD students.

Other Contributions: Professor Kaul has served on several national and international scientific committees. He served as the President and Vice-President of the Indian Physics Association (Hyderabad Chapter).

Awards and Honours: Professor Kaul was awarded MRSI Medal and Citation (1988). He was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, London (1987) and Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore (2003).