Ashtekar Offered Kramers Visiting Chair in The Netherlands

21 July 2006—Abhay Ashtekar, Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Physics and director of the Penn State Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry, was invited by Nobel laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft of the Spinoza Institute at Ultretcht University in The Netherlands to fill the Kramers Visiting Chair of Theoretical Physics. The national chair enabled Ashtekar to interact with physicists and mathematicians in Ultretcht and Amsterdam this spring. He gave a set of lectures on black holes and presented several talks and seminars on recent developments in cosmology. He also gave an invited lecture at the conference “Beyond the Quantum” at the Lorentz Center—an international center in Leiden,
The Netherlands.

The Kramers Chair was established in 1975, in honor of Dutch physicist Hendrik Anton (Hans) Kramers, to enable distinguished scientists from around the world to interact with scientists in The Netherlands. The chair provides an invaluable link with the international world of physics, and has provided for research in many areas of modern physics, including statistical mechanics, condensed matter, light nuclei, and field theory. Ashtekar joins a number of eminent scientists who have occupied the Kramers Chair in the past. Previous chair holders include Sir Michael V. Berry of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom; Edouard Brezin, president of the French Academy of Sciences and professor of physics at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, France; Ludvig Faddeev, director of the Euler International Mathematical Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia; Paul B. Wiegmann of the University of Chicago; Nobel laureate Eugene P. Wigner, professor emeritus of mathematical physics at Princeton University; Polish mathematician Mark Kac; Dutch physicist Max Dresden; and many other noted scientists.

Ashtekar has been the director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry since 1993, where his research focuses on quantum gravity and general relativity. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Foreign Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in India, and an Honorary Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences. He is chief editor for physics for the journal Advances in Mathematical and Theoretical Physics, and was a managing editor for general relativity and quantum gravity for the International Journal of Modern Physics-D from 1992 to 2006.

Ashtekar has served as president of the American chapter of the Indian Physics Association, as chair of the Topical Group in Gravitation of the American Physical Society, and as the chair of a Special Emphasis Panel of the National Science Foundation. He has authored or edited five scientific books and more than 170 scientific papers.

Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Ashtekar held positions as professor, distinguished professor, and the Erastus Franklin Holden Professor of Physics at Syracuse University from 1984 to 1993. Prior to that he was professor and chair of gravitation at the University of Paris VI in France. He earned his doctoral degree in physics at the University of Chicago, and his bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics at the University of Bombay in India.

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