Ramamurti Shankar

Ramamurti Shankar is the Josiah Willard Gibbs professor of Physics at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut. He received his B.Tech. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras and his Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics from the University of California, Berkeley (1974).

His research is in theoretical condensed matter physics, although he is also known for his earlier work in theoretical particle physics. In 2009, Shankar was awarded the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society for “innovative applications of field theoretic techniques to quantum condensed matter systems.” After three years at the Harvard Society of Fellows, he joined the Yale Physics Department, which he chaired between 2001-2007. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the second Indian after S. Chandrasekhar to be a member of Harvard Society of Fellows. His Youtube lectures have been viewed by over 20 million people. In 2004 he was appointed the John Randolph Huffman Professor of Physics and in 2019 the Josiah Willard Gibbs Professor of Physics.