Summary: Sourendu Gupta received a Bsc (1979) and an Msc (1981) from IIT Kharagpur, a Ph.D. (1988) from the University of Mumbai for work done in TIFR. He did post-doctoral work in I.M.Sc. Chennai (1988), the university of Bielefeld in Germany (1988-90), CERN Geneva (1990-92) and the KFA Juelich (1992-93). In 1993 he joined the faculty of TIFR, where he is currently a professor in the Department of Theoretical Physics.
Academic and Research Achievements: Gupta has worked on different aspects of the theory and phenomenology of the strong interactions. His early work on hard QCD processes in heavy-ion collisions, especially the J/Ψ meson, leptons and photons at the LHC led to the establishment of the field of hard-probes of the QCD plasma. Subsequent work in lattice gauge theory led to the development of a new method for solving the ubiquitous sign problem in statistical mechanics. Using this method he and his collaborators explored the phase diagram of QCD and predicted the location of a critical point within reach of experiments. His work led to the first experimental measurement of the QCD crossover temperature.
Other contributions: Gupta was instrumental in setting up the nationwide collaboration called the Indian Lattice Gauge Theory Initiative (ILGTI), which brought together computing resources for lattice gauge theory in India which are competitive with those available to other large collaborations around the globe. Gupta is actively involved in developing and testing coursework which adds computational methods to the repertory of other techniques used to teach basic concepts of physics.
Awards and Honours: Gupta is a fellow of Indian Academy of Science (Bangalore) and a recipient of the J. C. Bose Fellowship.
