E. V. Sampathkumaran, born on 6 December 1954 in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, earned his BSc degree from the University of Madras before obtaining a master's degree from Annamalai University.[2] Subsequently, he joined Tata Institute of Fundamental Research as a member of faculty in 1976.[3] During this period, he enrolled at the University of Mumbai for doctoral studies on valence fluctuations in rare-earth compounds and secured a PhD in 1982, guided by Ramanuja Vijayaraghavan, a Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar laureate. He did his post-doctoral work on valence fluctuations as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Free University of Berlin, under the guidance of G. Kaindl, during 1983–84 and returned to TIFR to resume his career there. Barring two sabbaticals, the first as an Indo-Waseda Exchange Visitor for two months in 1988 to Japan and the other, a two-month stint at Paderborn University in 1996, his entire career was spent at TIFR, holding various positions. During 2008–10, he chaired the Department of Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science after which he served as the dean of the Natural Sciences faculty from 2010 to 2013. After his superannuation in 2014, he continues his association with the institute as a Distinguished Professor.[4] He also had a brief stint as the director of the institute during April–July 2015[5] and served as an Honorary Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research from 2001 to 2015.[3]
Animation about the magnetoresistance discovery Graphs
Sampathkumaran's early research was focused on intermetallics and oxides, with regard to their solid state properties and his work led to the identification of new fluctuating-valent rare-earth systems.[2] The thermal and transport behaviour of magnetic systems,[6][7]superconductivity, physics of d- and f-electron systems, Kondo lattices, geometrically frustrated magnetism, spin-chain magnetism, multiferroics and nanomagnetism have been some of the other areas of his work.[4] His studies have been documented by way of a number of articles[8][9][note 2] and the online article repository of the Indian Academy of Sciences has listed 302 of them.[10]
The Indian National Science Academy awarded Sampathkumaran the INSA Young Scientists Medal in 1986[15] and a decade later, he received the MRSI Medal of the Materials Research Society of India in 1996.[16] The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, one of the highest Indian science awards in 1999.[17]
Sitikantha D. Das, S. Narayana Jammalamadaka, Kartik K. Iyer, E. V. Sampathkumaran (2009). "Magnetic ordering in the fine particles of some bulk Pauli paramagnets". Physical Review B. 80 (2): 024401. Bibcode:2009PhRvB..80b4401D. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.80.024401. S2CID118482309.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
Kalobaran Maiti, Swapnil Patil, E. V. Sampathkumaran (2010). "Kondo resonance in magnetic and non-magnetic Ce-intermetallics". AIP Conference Proceedings. 1347: 181–186. doi:10.1063/1.3601812.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
