ICTS

Research Interests:

Directeur de Recherche in CNRS, working at the laboratoire de physique theorique et modeles statisques (LPTMS), Universite' Paris-Sud (Orsay, France). He is also an adjunct professor at the department of theoretical physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR, Bombay, India), International Center for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS, Bangalore, India) and at the deprtament of the physics of complex systems at Weizmann Institute (Rehovot, Israel). He obtained his Ph.D. from Tata Institute in 1992. He received the Paul Langevin medal for theoretical physics from the French physical Society in 2005. He has worked on a wide variety of problems in equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical physics, with applications ranging from granular systems all the way to the analysis of algorithms in computer science. He has made important contributions in the field of self-organized criticality, polymers and self-avoiding walks, growth models, persistence and first-passage properties in nonequilibrium systems, Brownian motion/diffusion and their applications, interacting particle systems and their nonequilibrium steady state properties and in understanding how stress propagates in granular systems. More recently, he has been working on the applications of statistical physics in computer science (sorting and search algorithms), extreme value statistics in various systems, in particular, in the theory of random matrices and its various applications.