The Indian Contender For Nobel Prize In Physics

[caption id="attachment_841" align="aligncenter" width="345"] Prof Ramamoorthy Ramesh, Indian born contender for Nobel Prize, Physics[/caption]

Indians and India have not been far off when contending or bagging the mother of all prizes, The Nobel Prize. Many have been in the league as silent crusaders. The Nobel Prizes were instituted to reward these crusaders or organizations who have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.

As Indians wse are familiar with a Satyajit Ray, Rabindranath Tagore, C.V.Raman, Mother Teresa or even Amartya Sen. And until one googles, one wouldn’t know that we had a PIO, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (nephew of C.V.Raman) who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 with William Alfred Fowler! Little did many of us know that this year there was an Indian contender for Nobel Prize in Physics.

Ramamoorthy Ramesh is an Indian born professor of Physics, teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. His path breaking research on ferroelectric materials to  enable technology in supporting data storage, was shortlisted for the Nobel. Back in 1989, Ramesh was piqued to know more about materials that speed up data storage. It was in that very year that James. F.Scott, ‘father of integrated ferroelectrics’ developed FeRam or Ferroelectric Ram, an information technology offering high-speed memory storage with low power consumption.

Prof Ramesh, is currently member of the American Physical Society, a leading American organization for physicists. He has won the prestigious David Adler Lectureship award, given to people for their worthy contributions in the field of materials physics.

Though nominations and nominees to Nobel Prize are kept a secret for 50 years, Prof Ramamoorthy’s name has been featured on the Intellectual Property and Science Unit list of Thomson Reuters since 2002. The Nobel Prize for Physics is said to be the most prestigious of its kind and needless to say being listed as a contender is no mean achievement.

A Nobel Prize can be shared maximum by three people and isn’t granted posthumously. The prize comes with a cash award of 8 million Swedish kronor- approx. 7 crore 64 lakhs in Indian currency.

This Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three Japanese scientists, Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura for cracking the problem of making blue light-emitting diodes.

Names of Indian Laureates who have made us proud in the past:

Year	Laureates	Subject	Notes
1902	Ronald Ross	Medicine	Indian-born British citizen
1907	Rudyard Kipling	Literature	Indian-born British citizen
1979	Abdus Salam	Physics	Indian-born Pakistan citizen
1989	14th Dalai Lama	Peace	Tibetan religious leader residing in India
2001	S. Naipaul	Literature	Trinidadian born British citizen of Indian descent
2006	Muhammad Yunus	Peace	Indian-born Bangladesh citizen
2007	Rajendra K. Pachauri	Peace	Indian citizen and the chairman of Nobel winning IPCC
2009	Venkatraman Ramakrishnan	Chemistry	Indian-born U.S citizen

News Source: Wikipedia, The Wall Street Journal

Image Source: Centre for Advanced NanoScience, Medal J.Nu