Praveen Chaudhari

Praveen Chaudhari (born November 30, 1937 in Ludhiana , Punjab , India , † January 13, 2010 in Briarcliff Manor , New York ) was an Indian-American physicist in the field of materials science .

Life

In 1961 he earned his bachelor's degree with honors from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and then went to the USA . In 1963 he received his Masters and 1966 PhD in physical metallurgy , both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . His work on the irradiation effect in bismuth telluride was supervised by Michael Bever. Then he moved to IBM at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center , where he became director of the physics department in 1981. As Scientific Vice President (since 1982) he was responsible for all IBM research projects. During his term of office, scientists from IBM won the Nobel Prize in Physics for two consecutive years : 1986 Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer for the construction of the scanning tunneling microscope and 1987 Johannes Georg Bednorz and Karl Alexander Müller for the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials. After 1991 Chaudhari devoted himself entirely to research. In 2003 he became director at Brookhaven National Laboratory for three years .

Chaudhari worked particularly in the field of the structure and properties of amorphous solids, he researched mechanical properties of thin films and crystalline solids, high-temperature superconductors, but also magnetic monopoles and neutrino mass experiments. He discovered and developed amorphous magnetic materials that are the basis for Magneto Optical Disks . He has published more than 150 scientific articles and holds more than 20 patents.

Chaudhari had been married to Karin Romhild since June 13, 1964 and had two children (Ashok and Pia).

Prices

• 1987 George E. Pake Prize from the American Physical Society
• 1992 Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Prize from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
• 1992 Excellence Award from the US Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce
• 1993 Harry C. Gatos Prize from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 1995 National Medal of Technology

Memberships

• National Academy of Sciences
• American Institute of Physics
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1999)
• American Physical Society
• National Academy of Engineering
• New York Academy of Sciences

literature

• Who's Who in America. 2007, ISBN 0-8379-7006-7 , p. 760
• Supratik Guha, Robert Rosenberg and Jochen Mannhart: Praveen Chaudhari. In: Physics Today. April 2010, pp. 64–65 (with picture), doi : 10.1063 / 1.3397050

Web links

• Portrait (3 MB)
• Biography on bnl.gov (English)