About us

Information about the Centre:

During the past year, our institution - Indian Institute of Technology Madras - was identified as one of the Institutes of Eminence (IoE, see https://www.education.gov.in/en/ioe) in India. As an IoE, our institute has instituted several Centres of Excellence (CoE), one of which is Centre for Strings, Gravitation and Cosmology (https://ioe.iitm.ac.in/project/strings-gravitation-and-cosmology/). The current members of this centre are: L. Sriramkumar (Cosmology), Suresh Govindarajan (String Theory), Ayan Mukhoyadhyay (String Theory), Dawood Kothawala (Classical and Quantum Gravity) and Chandra Kant Mishra (Gravitational Waves). The members of the Advisory Committee for the centre are: B. S. Sathyaprakash, Jerome Martin, and Kostas Skenderis.

Being a theoretical group, the primary goal of the Centre is to increase academic interactions and collaborations. Apart from having regular national and international visitors, we expect to conduct Schools and Workshops every year on the different topics of our interest. Although most of the activities of the centre are presently being planned in an online mode, we are hoping to have visitors for extended duration and organise events on-campus as soon as the situation becomes conducive for travel.

Gravitation and Cosmology in Chennai:

IIT Madras is amongst one of the oldest and leading technical institutes in India, and has been consistently ranked as a top institute in the country. The Department of Physics at IITM is one of the largest in the country, with research spanning a wide range of topics in theoretical and experimental physics. Apart from IITM, Chennai is also home to the Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI) and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc). These institutes have research groups actively working in the areas of gravitation and cosmology, making it an attractive destination for research in these directions. One of the aims of our Centre would be to showcase this fact, and provide an exposure to graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to current issues and recent developments in the areas of Classical and Quantum Gravity, Cosmology, and Gravitational waves.