Alokmay Datta

Biography

I was born in 22 August 1957 in a town called Coochbehar in the state of West Bengal, India but I have lived in the metropolis of Kolkata since I was a few months old. I passed out from school in 1975 and did my graduation (BSc) with Physics major and Chemistry and Maths as minors from St Xavier's College (Calcutta University). I did my Masters in Physics from Calcutta University in 1980 and joined Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics as a Research Fellow working on Microwave Spectroscopy of molecules as my dissertation topic. My PhD was awarded in 1989 by Calcutta University and I joined Saha Institute as a Lecturer in the Solid State and Molecular Physics Division in 1990. I did some work on coupling of intense radiation to matter and then shifted my interest to Langmuir monolayers in 1992, where I and my friend Sujata Modak predicted in 1994 the formation of a 2D lattice of counter-ions beneath a Langmuir monolayer of fatty-acids that was experimentally corroborated by the group of Als-Nielsen in that year. In 1996, I and my senior colleague Milan Kumar Sanyal set up a laboratory to study surfaces and interfaces by x-ray scattering and scanning probe microscopy, where we showed for the first time that molecules in a polymer film below a certain thickness spontaneously form layers parallel to the surface, a phenomenon that was found also to happen in a simple liquid by me with co-workers in the laboratory of Pulak Dutta in Northwestern University, USA, during my postdoctoral stint from 1998-2000.

Education

BSc (Physics Major), Calcutta University, Kolkata, 1978
MSc (Physics), Calcutta University, Kolkata, 1980
PhD (Physics), Calcutta University, Kolkata, 1989

Websites

• academia

• saha institute

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