Dr. Charusita Chakravarty: India is a land, which from ancient times has been infused with a spirit of inquiry. Indians have initiated several pioneering and remarkable efforts in the fields of Science in the past as well as during present times, which has been their unique contribution to the progress of humanity. It is with the desire to commemorate and salute this Spirit in our women scientists and also to honour their originality of thought and research that the Stree Shakti Science Samman award has been instituted in 2000.
With impressive academic accomplishments, Dr. Charusita Chakravarty joined IIT Delhi in 1994 as a faculty in the Department of Chemistry. She works on the development and application of quantum and classical computer simulation methods to understand properties of liquids, and the atomic level reorganizations associated with phase transitions and self-assembly processes.
Much of her work on liquids in the past few years has centered on understanding the anomalous properties of water since hydration is a fundamental process in many chemical and biological systems. Her work on phase transitions and energy landscapes is of relevance to understanding sol-gel transitions in lipid bilayers, protein folding and protein aggregation.
Dr. Chakravarty has been recognized and honoured by several institutes. She received the INSA Medal for Young Scientists (1996), A. K. Bose Memorial Award of INSA (1999), B. M. Birla Science Award (1999), Bronze Medal of the Chemical Research Society of India (2004) and the Swarnajayanti Fellowship of the Department of Science and Technology (2004). She was as an Associate Member of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy from 1996 to 2003 and is currently an Associate Member of the Centre for Computational Materials Science, JNCASR, Bangalore. She was elected a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore in 2006.
We are privileged to confer on her Stree Shakti Science Samman for the year 2009.
