Prof.Krishna Rajagopal

 Prof.  Krishna Rajagopal, Guest Lecturer at the Emilio Segre Distinguished Lectures in Physics Endowed by Raymond and Beverly Sackler for the academic year 2012/2013, is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Associate Head for Education at MIT.

Prof. Rajagopal had obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University and then spent three years at Harvard as a Junior Fellow. He then spent one year at Caltech before coming to MIT in 1997.

Prof. Rajagopal was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2004 and was awarded the Everett Moore Baker award for excellence in undergraduate teaching in 2011 and the Buechner prize for excellence in teaching in 1999. 

Prof. Rajagopal’s theoretical physics research focuses on how quarks ordinarily confined within protons and neutrons behave in extraordinary conditions such as in the hot quark soup that filled the microseconds-old universe. This liquid was the earliest and is in a sense the simplest, complex form of matter and as such forms a testbed for understanding how a complex world emerges from simple underlying laws. Rajagopal's work links nuclear and particle physics, condensed matter physics, astrophysics, and string theory.