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Gautam I Menon (born October 16, 1966) is a Professor of Physics and Biology at Ashoka University, known for his work in condensed matter physics, biophysics, disease modeling and science communication. He is the Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability at the university. He is also a Professor with the Theoretical Physics and Computational Biology groups at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, where he was the founding Dean of the Computational Biology group till 2019. He is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India.

Education and Career
He completed a BSc. (Hons) in Physics at St. Stephens College, Delhi, an MSc from IIT Kanpur, and a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, working with Chandan Dasgupta and Rahul Pandit. Following post-doctoral work at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai and the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, he joined the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai. After working for nearly 20 years there, he moved on lien to Ashoka University in Sonepat, Haryana as Professor in its Physics and Biology departments.

Between 2011 and 2013, he was a Visiting Professor at the Mechanobiology Institute and the Department of Biological Sciences at the National University of Singapore.

Research
His research work, spread over approximately 100 papers and articles, covers a range of areas in condensed matter physics and statistical physics, biophysics, disease modeling and public policy.

His research has contributed to the understanding of phase transitions in the vortex state of superconductors, in particular flux-lattice melting, the development of liquid state theories for disordered vortex lines , the phase diagram of disordered vortex systems , the interpretation of muon-spin-rotation experiments in the vortex state and the theory of the peak effect. He proposed a universal phase diagram for disordered type-II superconductors . In a series of papers, he and collaborators provided the first direct evidence of the vortex glass state from muon-spin rotation experiments , demonstrating the existence of three-body correlations in the vortex state. His other work in this field includes a theory for surface melting of the vortex lattice, a theory of the suppression of the vortex lattice melting line by disorder , the first thermodynamic description of the anomalous density change at the flux-lattice melting transition , and a description of peak effect anomalies in terms of two-phase dynamic coexistence in the presence of weak, quenched disorder.

He has proposed that many common features of large-scale nuclear architecture in higher eukaryotes can be understood in terms of the non-equilibrium aspects of chromatin, developing this approach in a series of papers with collaborators . His other biophysical work deals with models for molecular motors, DNA mechanics , active membranes  , self-organized pattern formation in motor-microtubule mixtures , stem cell mechanics , cell adhesion and models for collective behaviour in cyanobacterial colonies. With Sriram Ramaswamy he proposed that cyclically sheared, non-Brownian colloidal suspensions might provide the first realization of the conserved directed percolation class.

He is one of the founders of the Indian Scientists' Response to COVID-19 (ISRC), a volunteer group of scientists working in public communication around the COVID-19 pandemic in India. He has led a number of modeling efforts for COVID-19 in India. These include the development of INDSCI-SIM, a detailed compartmental epidemiological model for India, and BharatSim , an ultra-large-scale agent-based model for infectious disease spread in India. He has studied vaccine allocation strategies, as well as optimal testing strategies, for India.

He has written widely on the interface of science and society, on science policy and science communication , ,, . He has a long-standing interest in science communication and started, with K.N. Raghavan, the Science at the Sabha series of public talks on science , now held annually at the Music Academy in Chennai. He is often quoted in the international and national media on issues relating to science policy and the COVID-19 pandemic in India and is regularly interviewed on international and national TV channels.

Awards and Honors
He was named an Associate of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bengaluru in 1997 and awarded a DST Fast Track Fellowship for Young Scientists in 2002. He was awarded the Swarnajayanti Fellowship of the Department of Science and Technology (India) in 2005, India's premier mid-career fellowship for scientists. He was awarded the DAE-SRC Outstanding Research Investigator Fellowship in 2010. He was named an Outstanding Referee by the American Physical Society in 2012, as well as recognized as an Outstanding Reviewer of the UK-based "Reports on Progress in Physics" in 2016. He was named a Shastri Fellow of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute in 2018.

He has served on scientific review committees of several international agencies, including the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) and the Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance, in addition to the SERB and the DBT in India. His research has been funded by several national and international agencies, including the WHO, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the European Union FP7, the Indo-French CEFIPRA as well as the DBT, DST and DAE in India. He has lectured in universities and scientific conferences around the world and in India and has been a organizer or speaker in multiple flagship bilateral scientific meetings, including the Indo-US Frontiers of Science, the Indo-US Frontiers of Engineering, the Indo-UK Frontiers of Science and the Indo-Israel Workshops on Condensed Matter Physics. He was an invited speaker at the 26th IUPAP International conference on Statistical Physics (Statphys) held in Lyon in 2016.

He was appointed a Member of the Thematic Group (Education) that contributed to developing the Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy of the Government of India (STIP 2020). He was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India in 2019.