2020 - Annual Report

Abstract

During the period April 2019 - March 2020, the Institute organized or co-sponsored several workshops and conferences.

The First IMSc discussion meeting on extreme QCD matter held during Sep16-21, 2019 brought together senior scientists to deliver a set of pedagogic lectures on the current state-of-the-art, open problems and challenges in the area of hot and dense QCD matter. The annual meeting of the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA) was organized during Jun 10 Jun 21, 2019 by its Indian arm, of which IMSc is a part. An NCM sponsored workshop on Combinatorial Models for Representation Theory was organised in IMSc during Nov 4-16, 2019 and saw active participation from Ph.D students and postdocs from across the country. An ACM-India Summer School on Graphs and Graph Algorithms and a meeting on Recent Trends in Algorithms were both organised during the year. The outreach programmes have expanded in scope and reach during this year. In regular events such as the Teachers Enrichment Workshop, Vigyan Pratibha Chennai Regional Teachers Workshop , Summer School Students Workshop, Facets, kaNita-kAnakam, Enriching Mathematics Education and Science at the Sabha continued to draw enthusiastic participants across the spectrum - students, teachers and the general public. In addition, newer events were organised this year such as the TNSF Chithirai FEST-I, Topics in Biology and Excitement in Science. In the run-up to and during The annular solar eclipse of December 26, 2019, many institute members worked with local science popularization organizations in various public activities such as distributing masks and spreading awareness about eclipses. The institute also organised some one-off public lectures on Using ancient DNA to understand Indian history, Logic for non-persons?, The Cryosphere and Climate of the Earth, A Symplectic World View and Science Communication and Education whose Science, for whom?. The outreach related activities in the Institute are the initiative of several institute members. Their untiring efforts, enthusiastically supported by the IMSc administration, PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, to make scientific research accessible and exciting to students and teachers at various levels, deserves all praise. Research productivity of the members of the Institute has been excellent throughout the year. Several high quality publications have been reported in national and international journals, and some of the research work carried out has also been presented in international conferences. A total of 16 students were awarded ‘PhD’ degree, 12 students have submitted their PhD theses. 5 students were awarded ‘MSc by Research’ degree, under the supervision of IMSc faculty. There are several ongoing collaborations between other institutions, both national and international, and research groups of IMSc. Among these, here is a mention of a few. Arecibo 327 MHz Drift Pulsar Survey (AO327) is an international effort to discover pulsars and transients iiusing the Arecibo radio telescope (USA). The institutes involved are Naval Research Laboratory USA, University of New Mexico USA, West Virginia University USA, IMSc India (Manjari Bagchi) and Max-Planck-Institut fur Radioastronomie Bonn Germany. IMSc is also part of another such effort, using the uGMRT in Pune, along with collaborators from NCRA-TIFR Pune, SINP Kolkata, IUCAA Pune, RRI Bangalore, NISER Bhubaneswar, University of California Berkeley (USA), and ASTRON (The Netherlands). IMSc is now an international research laboratory for the Indo-French Program in Mathematics for four years. The Institute is part of an R&D Networked joint Center involving partners at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (Bengaluru), Brandeis University (USA), National Centre for Biological Sciences (Bengaluru) and Northeastern University (USA), to pursue theoretical and computational research on the localization of pathways by which stress propagates in disordered, soft matter and biological systems. A new CEFIPRA funded project on Modeling Soft Glass flow from micro to macro scale is a collaboration with the Universit Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France. As part of the ongoing Max Planck Partner Group in Mathematical Biology, IMSc has been collaborating with MPIMIS Leizig on the study of biological networks. During 2019-2020, a total of 35 lecture courses were conducted at the Institute. We are proud to note the awards and honors bestowed on our faculty for their contributions: Amritanshu Prasad was elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences 2019. Dishant Pancholi was awarded The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in Mathematical Sciences for 2019. Saket Saurabh, was elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences 2019. R. Ramanujam was awarded the The Indira Gandhi Prize for popularization of science for 2020. Biplab Paul, a recent graduate student in Mathematics, has been awarded the JSPS post-doctoral fellowship in Japan. Roohani Sharma, a senior research fellow (graduate student) in Theoretical Computer Science was offered a Lisa Meitner Award postdoctoral fellowship for excellent women computer scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, that allows her to pursue independent research. The last year also witnessed a sad event for the Institute. Prof. S.K. Joshi, former Chairman of the IMSc Executive Council and member of the IMSc Governing Board, passed away on May 15, 2020. The Institute deeply mourns his demise and places on record its appreciation for his contributions as Chairman of the Executive Council, a position which he held for over two decades.