Utpal Sarkar earned the BSc and MSc degrees at Calcutta University where he also obtained the PhD working with A Raychaudhuri. Thereafter, he visited the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ASICTP), Trieste, Italy in 1983, worked with JC Pati and Abdus Salam. He then spent two years at the University of Texas and one year at the University of Toronto, as postdoctoral fellow. He joined the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai as Assistant Professor (1987) and then moved to the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) after one year.

Academic and Research Achievements: Sarkar made pioneering contributions in neutrino physics and astroparticle physics. He proposed a new source of CP violation that can contribute to explanation of why there is more matter in the universe as compared to antimatter. One outcome of this proposal termed the resonant leptogenesis. He also proposed a mechanism to explain the smallness of neutrino masses and its relationship to cosmology. He authored around 175 research articles in refereed journals, and has also written a text book Particle and Astroparticle Physics (Taylor and Francis, NY, 2007).

Awards and Honours: Professor Sarkar was awarded the INSA Young Scientist Medal (1988), the Humboldt Fellowship (1993), Associateship (1995) and Senior Associateship (2003) of ASICTP, Trieste, Italy, and Clark Way Harrison Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Washington University, St. Louis (2009). He was elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore (2008) and Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (India), Allahabad (2009). He received the Goyal Prize, Kurukshetra University (2008), J.C. Bose National Fellowship of DST (2013) and Nuclear Physics B outstanding referee award (Elsevier, 2014).