Ashoke Sen

He was born in Calcutta, and is the elder son of Anil Kumar Sen, a former professor of physics at the Scottish Church College, and Gouri Sen, a homemaker.

After completing his schooling from the Sailendra Sircar Vidyalaya in Kolkata, he earned his bachelor’s of science degree in 1975 from the Presidency College under the University of Calcutta, and his master’s three years later from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He did his doctoral work in physics at Stony Brook University.

Ashoke Sen made a number of major original contributions to the subject of string theory, including his landmark paper on strong-weak coupling duality or S-duality, which was influential in changing the course of research in the field. He pioneered the study of unstable D-branes and made the famous Sen conjecture about open string tachyon condensation on such branes. His description of rolling tachyons has been influential in string cosmology. He has also co-authored many important papers on string field theory. One of his most recent contributions include the entropy function formalism for extremal black holes and its applications to attractors. His current research interests are centered around the attractor mechanism and the precision counting of microstates of black holes.