ABOUT ME

Prof. Vijay A. Singh

A Brief Academic Profile

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Prof. Vijay A. Singh completed his doctoral degree from the State University of New York, Albany in 1978. He was a Professor of Physics at IIT - Kanpur for over twenty years (1984 - 2005) and then at India’s premier research institute, The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (HBCSE), Mumbai as well as Adjunct Professor Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay and Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences, Mumbai University. He has spent considerable time in Mumbai, Kanpur, USA (over ten years) and the Saran region of rural Bihar from where he hails. He is a Raja Ramana Fellow and and Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (India).

Prof. Vijay A. Singh oversaw India’s Olympiad efforts as the National Coordinator, Science Olympiads at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Mumbai [1998-2014]. This is a prestigious program of the Government of India. Under his stewardship the Indian team has won a large number of gold medals in the International Olympiads in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. In 2004 a major programme for nurturing undergraduate students namely the National Initiative in Undergraduate Science (NIUS), was launched and Prof. Vijay Singh became its National Coordinator. The large number of international publications and conference presentations by undergraduate students (many with him) which has resulted under NIUS is probably unprecedented in the nation.

He has worked in areas as diverse as nanostructures, semiconductors, disordered metals, foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum chemistry and science education research . He has over 150 peer -reviewed international scientific publications and has to his credit over 250 conference presentations. He was a co-author of the NCERT Physics Textbooks for Higher Secondary School Physics and two books on the Physics Olympiad. He was also the chief editor of the Bulletin of the Indian Association of Physics Teachers (1997 - 2001). Besides the Olympiads, Prof. Singh has been on several scholarship panels for young students including the National Talent Science Scheme, the Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana, The Times Scholar and the Aditya Birla Scholarship.

Prof. Singh has worked at several places abroad, namely, the Solar Energy Research Institute, Colorado, USA, AT&T Bell Laboratories, New, Jersey, USA, the General Electric R&D Laboratory, Schenectady, USA, and the Institute of Defect Studies, SUNYA, USA. He has been a visiting faculty at universities in USA.

Prof. Singh is fluent in English, Hindi and Bhojpuri and moderately so in Marathi and Spanish. One of his hobbies is solving and designing challenging science problems at the school and college level.

[see:http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in/people/academic/vijay-singh]