Pratik Chattopadhyay
Postodoctoral Research Scientist
TD Lee Institute, Shanghai & UESTC, Chengdu

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About me

I am a postdoctoral research scientist jointly at the TD Lee Institute of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai and UESTC, Chengdu . Previously I held the position of assistant professor in Amity University, Jharkhand.   

My academic nourishment is diverse in terms of the universities concerned. I did my graduation from the University of Delhi with a major in Physics. Thereafter I  pursued a Masters degree from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Mohali, which is one of the constituent institutes of national importance. My mentor was Dr. K P Yogendran, who made my taste for mathematical physics. My major thrust area during these years was in particle physics phenomenology. I did my final research project with Dr. Ketan Patel and made it to a journal publication in Nuclear Physics B. I went to the United Kingdom in 2017 to pursue my doctoral studies. I joined the University of Nottingham, where my doctoral advisor was Prof Kirill Krasnov, who remains an active collaborator to this day. I pursued my incessant curiosities in the field of quantum gravity and published two papers in the high impact factor journal, JHEP (Journal of High Energy Physics) and one single author paper in the International Journal of Modern Physics A (IJMPA), World Scientific. Next, I got an EPSRC fellowship from the UK to pursue my postdoctoral studies, after which I came back to India. I served in two institutes as an assistant professor and after some time, decided to choose research as the career path. I thereby joined the current postdoctoral position.

As a full time academic, my goals are to create a research intensive environment with pedagogical teaching, enforcing the culmination of knowledge exchange with a primary focus on preparing an industry ready workforce. 

However, my main interests still lie on the domain of fundamental physics, on the problems with unifying gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature. The past decade or so has seen a tremendous influx of activities surrounding this problem, whose roots lie on the seminal breakthrough by Ed Witten on twistor string theory and by Bern, Carrassco and Johannson on the colourful duality between gauge and gravitational amplitudes. 

I am actively pursuing my research activities on the fields of scattering amplitudes, which are fundamental in the arena of quantum field theory. Besides, I collaborate with my fellow colleagues from the US and Europe on non-local field theories, chiral reformulation of gravity and their impact on cosmological frontiers.