Sriram Shastry
University of California, Santa Cruz
General Councillor
Biographical Summary
Sriram Shastry is a professor in the University of California at Santa Cruz. He received his B.Sc. in Physics from Nagpur University; his M.Sc. from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 1970 and his Ph.D. from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay in 1976. He did post doctoral work at the Imperial College London 1979-80, and at the University of Utah 1980-82. He was a faculty member at the Tata Institute 1982-87, visiting faculty at Princeton University 1987-88 and a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill 1988-94. He was a professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 1994-2003 and has been at Santa Cruz since 2003.
Shastry is a theoretical condensed matter physicist who has worked in a wide variety of problems, from exactly integrable and exactly solvable models of quantum spins, to problems involving phenomenological modeling of experiments such as NMR relaxation rates, the Hall constant and Raman Scattering in high Tc systems. He is the co-inventor of some popular models of quantum magnetism in low dimensional systems, where quantum fluctuations are dominant. He is mainly concerned, these days, with transport problems in strongly interacting electronic systems.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the TWAS (Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, Trieste, Italy). He received the 1998 TWAS award in Physics for his work on interacting quantum many body physics. He is married and has two sons.
Candidate's Statement
The main work of my group these days is in the field of strongly interacting many body systems. We model a variety of transport phenomena in different materials with strong correlations .The High Tc wave presented a set of almost insurmountable basic problems, involving strongly interacting electron systems. The lack of perturbative methods, and the limitations of the alternate numerical methods such as the study of finite clusters, makes progress slow. With the advent of optical lattices, and with the discovery of newer correlated materials, we are finding that many of the difficult issues are reviving, providing us with projects where the old problems find a newer context.
On the training front, one of the big issues that we confront is the enormous mass of information and techniques that students and postdocs have to digest, before doing a meaningful calculation that would interest the community. With our collective effort, these barriers are climbed, but not before everyone is forced to introspect about ones commitment to the discipline. The newcomers feel, with some justification, that the early workers had an easier time. These are the typical travails of a mature field.
Despite these difficulties, many persist and then grow, providing the much needed human input into the discipline. It seems to me that one of the main reasons why a difficult and demanding subject like Physics survives, and actually thrives, is the collective passion that we, as a community, channel into it. I admire the role played in this endeavor by the APS, through its many activities, including the publication of excellent journals. One outstanding example is the yearly meetings where a free exchange of ideas takes places in a great and informal atmosphere with its unique combination of regulations and of the lack of restrictions-- anyone can present any of their work, but within the confines of the magic 10 minutes! A Nobel laureate might attend the talk of a graduate student without fanfare, and becomes available to one and all for a chat in the coffee breaks. The buzz and excitement that the meetings generate is of particular importance for younger persons, for it provides evidence to them that Physics is alive and well, and hence is well worth committing ones future to. Here and elsewhere, bright young people are begining to find greener pastures in possibly less taxing , but certainly more paying activities such as software development, and basic sciences may well become the victims of growth in these other areas. Participating in such conferences is an antidote to this migration; if convinced about the genuineness of excitement in science, young people are willing to take the risk. Having seen science at close quarters elsewhere, I feel that this country is the “original home” for this sense of excitement. Through such conferences and various other programs on graduate and undergraduate education and career guidance, the APS is playing a leading role, and hence its well-being is crucial for physicists everywhere. I am honored to be asked to stand for election as a General Councillor, and given the opportunity, would do my best to support the mission of the APS.
