Deepak Dhar Awarded 2026 Dirac Medal

Key facts

• Deepak Dhar has been awarded the 2026 Dirac Medal by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) for his contributions to statistical mechanics.
• He is one of four physicists selected this year for the honour, which is considered among the highest in the field of physics.
• Born in 1951 in Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Dhar studied at Allahabad University and IIT Kanpur before completing his PhD from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1978.
• At Caltech, he worked closely with physicist Richard Feynman and held the Richard Feynman fellowship.
• He returned to India and joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, and also served as a professor at IISER Pune.
• His notable work includes Dhar's burning algorithm, developed in connection with sandpile models, which has become influential in the study of self-organised criticality.
• In 2022, he became the first Indian to receive the Boltzmann Medal, and in 2023 he was awarded the Padma Bhushan.
• The Dirac Medal, instituted in 1985 in honour of physicist Paul Dirac, is not awarded to Nobel, Fields, or Wolf Prize winners.