Prize Recipient

B. Sriram Shastry
University of California, Santa Cruz

Citation:

"For pioneering work in developing and solving models of strongly correlated systems and for wide-ranging contributions to phenomenological many-body theory, which have advanced the analysis of experiments on strongly correlated materials."

Background:

Sriram Shastry received his BSc (1968) from SA College in Akola (Nagpur University), MSc (1970) from I.I.T. Madras, and PhD (1976) from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (T.I.F.R.) Bombay. He was at Utah (1980-82), TIFR (82-87), Princeton (1987-88 & 2000-01), AT&T Bell Labs (1988-1994), Indian Institute of Science (I.I.Sc. 1994-2003) and is Professor at UC Santa Cruz since 2003.

Dr. Shastrys PhD was in itinerant electron magnetism and quantum spin systems in low dimensions, these topics continue to fascinate him to date. At Utah he started a collaboration with Dr. Bill Sutherland on solvable models. At T.I.F.R., he worked on the integrability of the 1-d Hubbard model, and the magnetism of metals. At Princeton, he worked on the Gutzwiller type wave functions, and on rigorous theorems for long ranged order in quantum statistical mechanics. At the Bell Laboratories, he developed theories for understanding Nuclear Magnetic Relaxation, the Hall constant and Raman scattering in High Tc systems. At IISc he worked on Spin Ice, and on the problem of superconductivity in purely repulsive models. His current interests include thermoelectric effects in strongly correlated systems such as sodium cobaltate.

Dr. Shastry is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the three National Academies of Science in India and a Fellow of TWAS (Trieste). He received the physics prize of TWAS in 1999.

Selection Committee:

Paul M. Goldbart, Chair, A.L. Barabasi, C. Pethick, L. Radzihovsky, R. Kamien