Ashoke Sen Wins Oskar Klein Medal, First Indian Physicist to Do So

Ashoke Sen, the string theorist at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) in Bengaluru, has become the first Indian physicist to receive the Oskar Klein Medal, awarded each year by Stockholm University and the Nobel Committee for Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. ICTS announced the 2026 award on 22 October, the day Sen gave the Oskar Klein Memorial Lecture, “Gravity from Strings and Strings from Gravity”, at Stockholm University’s AlbaNova Centre.

Black Holes and the Maths of Strings

The citation recognises his “pioneering contributions to string theory, black hole entropy and string field theory.” Sen’s work on S-duality helped show that different versions of string theory are linked, and his calculations gave an exact count of the microscopic states behind a black hole’s entropy. The medal, set up in 1988 and named after Swedish physicist Oskar Klein, has earlier gone to Chen-Ning Yang, Steven Weinberg and Hans Bethe.

Born in Kolkata in 1956, Sen studied at Presidency College and IIT Kanpur before a PhD at Stony Brook University. He holds the ICTS-Infosys Madhava Chair. His earlier honours include the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2012), the Dirac Medal (2014) and the Padma Bhushan (2013). ICTS Director Rajesh Gopakumar congratulated him on the award. More science stories on Positive News.

Source: Based on reporting by Business Today and Deccan Herald, and a post by R A Mashelkar.

Image: ICTP (file).