Sujan Sengupta

Dr. Sujan Sengupta was a Senior Professor until he opted for volunteer retirement in 2024 from Indian Institute of Astrophysics, a premier research institute of the country in Bangalore under the Ministry of Science and Technology, Govt. of India where he worked as a faculty for about two and a half decades. At present he is a Visiting Professor of Physics at Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana. After completing post-graduation in Mathematics from Burdwan University, West Bengal in 1990, he joined Indian Institute of Astrophysics at Bangalore as a CSIR Research Fellow. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Physics, Bangalore University in 1997 on Astrophysics. After a brief period of postdoctoral research supported by a NASA fellowship at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA, he returned to India and joined the same institute as a faculty. His research activities include theory and observation of extra-solar planets, brown dwarfs, neutron stars and low mass binary stars. He inititated research on Extra-solar planets in India and pioneered the polarimetric method for detection and characterization of exoplanets and brown dwarfs. Prof. Sujan Sengupta was one of the signatories along with the late Stephen Hawking, late Frank Drake, Prof. Kip Thorne et al. of the Breakthrough Initiative project, established by Yuri Milner, that search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. He is a member of the International Astronomical Union.

Besides publishing several research papers in the top most international peer reviewed journals, Prof. Sengupta has also authored a popular book entitled “Worlds Beyond Our Own - The search for Habitable Planets” published by Springer International. He has also written a similar book in Bengali entitled “Graha theke grahantore praner sandhane” which is published by Ananda Publishers Private Ltd. For his overall contribution on science literature in Bengali, Prof. Sujan Sengupta is awarded Rabindra Smriti Puraskar, the highest literature award in West Bengal by the Government of West Bengal in 2025.