Background
He was born on 15 July 1956 in Kolkata, and is the elder son of Anil Kumar Senator, a former professor of physics at the Scottish Church College, and Gouri Senator, a homemaker.
He was born on 15 July 1956 in Kolkata, and is the elder son of Anil Kumar Senator, a former professor of physics at the Scottish Church College, and Gouri Senator, a homemaker.
After completing his schooling from the Sailendra Sircar Vidyalaya and the Scottish Church Collegiate School in Kolkata, he earned his Bachelor 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 also is the Morningstar Visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a distinguished professor at the of Korea Institute for Advanced Study. His main area of work is String Theory. He was among the first recipients of the Fundamental Physics Prize “for opening the path to the realisation that all string theories are different limits of the same underlying theory”.
This prize has been set up by the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner for rewarding scientific breakthroughs.
He is one of signatories among 108 scientists and mathematicians who issued a public statement against rising intolerance in India in 2015. During his undergraduate studies at Presidency, he was greatly inspired by the work and teaching of Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri.
He did his doctoral work in physics at Stony Brook University. Ashoke Senator made a number of major original contributions to the subject of string theory, including his landmark paper on strong-weak coupling duality or South-duality, which was influential in changing the course of research in the field
He pioneered the study of unstable Doctorate-branes and made the famous Senator 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. His contributions include the entropy function formalism for extremal black holes and its applications to attractors.
His current research interests are centered on the attractor mechanism and the precision counting of microstates of black holes.
Recently he has joined National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER), Bhubaneswar, India as an honorary fellowship
Fellow: Royal Society, London, Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS prize 1997), National Academy of Sciences, India, Indian National Science Academy, Indian Academy of Sciences.
Son of; married Sumathi Rao, May 18, 1983.