User:Karan Kamble/C. Sivaram

Dr. C. Sivaram (born 1949) is presently the Senior Professor and the Chairman of Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. His research work spans various areas of Theoretical astrophysics, Cosmology, High energy physics and Theoretical physics. He is a fellow of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and has been a member of the IAU Commission No. 51 on Bioastronomy over the past several years. He is the recipient of the Martin Forster Gold Medal, Ettore Majorana Fellowship and the NATO fellowship. He has been involved in teaching several courses to both Joint Astronomy Program and IIA students, starting 1983 on several topics in physics and astronomy. Prof Sivaram contributes extensively to science popularization in India.

Education and Career
Dr. C. Sivaram received his Ph.D. degree from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in 1977. The publications and citations date back to 1973-74, while still a brilliant young student in his early twenties. A long list of publications and citations in journals (like Nature, Phys. Revs. etc) can be traced back to as early a time in his life as 1974 as a doctoral student at IISc.

He has been continuously cited in books and review articles since 1974-75 and it still carries on to this very day. A sample of 25 papers had 378 citations with an average of 12 citations a year. An invited review article published in 1979 (Physics Reports) had more than hundred citations. He has more than 200 publications in international journals, four books,   , and many contributed chapters to various books. Twenty of Sivaram's papers were selected for honorable mention in the Gravity Research Foundation competition, and one of the papers won 4th place in 2000.

With an experience of about 33 years since his Ph.D. and 22 years of experience in a senior capacity, he has had collaborations with distinguished physicists and astrophysicists within and beyond IIA on topics ranging from cosmology and gravitation to stellar and solar physics. Over the past few years, the collaboration has extended to leading scientists from several countries. Some of the recent ones include work on chromogravity approach to quark and gluon confinement with Nobel Laureate, Prof. Abdus Salam, which was further extended with Prof. Ne’eman; on spin and torsion effects in gravitation with Prof. de Sabbata ; on new models of inflation with Prof. de Andrade ; radiative effects of additional long range forces in binary systems with Prof. Bertotti ; COBE constraints on galaxy correlations with Prof. Landsberg; and many other topics ranging from interference in gravitational field, entropy of gravitating systems and new approaches to quantization of gravity, the latter areas in collaboration with noted scientists from Germany, Russia, Brazil and China. Apart from these, he has encompassed the entire spectrum of topics in astrophysics with several of his colleagues at IIA.

He has undertaken various projects at the national and international level. He was the Project Director of World Laboratory (Geneva) Projects during the period 1989-1994, and has been the reviewer for various projects of National Science Foundation during the period from 1990-1995. He was also part of the FBLJA project at CERN.

On Science Popularization
Sivaram has been involved in popularizing Astronomy and Astrophysics since the very early days while in his twenties. He has published about 50 articles and 50 popular talks in the last five years. He has been a visiting faculty since the year 2000 at the MP Birla Institute of Fundamental Research (MPBIFR), Bangalore, which primarily aims at promoting astronomy and astrophysics in India. He teaches Astrophysics, Astrobiology and Cosmology at MPBIFR, and also presents a series of lectures as an introductory course in Astrobiology and Cosmology. He also presents a series of lectures in the form of a certificate course to the students of the St. Joseph's College, Bangalore on Space and Rocket Dynamics.

Research Work
Sivaram’s early work on the early universe resulted in some of the earliest work on Inflation (cosmology) models dealing with a time varying cosmological constant (time varying vacuum energy). Some of the work has led to wonderful insights into the unification of fundamental interactions in the early universe with energy dependent coupling constants. Several contributions to high energy astrophysics include the origin and acceleration of the highest energy cosmic rays, gamma ray and neutrino production in quasar effects of neutron-antineutron oscillations, decay of cosmic strings and d-branes and COBE constraints on particle properties and theories. Immense contributions have been made to the solar neutrino problem, pulsar physics, gravitational radiation, theories of galaxy formation, Dark matter etc, along with relatively newer work on black hole entropy.