Ashoke Sen becomes the first Indian to receive the Oskar Klein Medal
Key facts
- String theorist Ashoke Sen has been awarded the 2026 Oskar Klein Medal. He is the first Indian physicist to receive it.
- Stockholm University and the Nobel Committee for Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences award the medal each year.
- Sen gave the Oskar Klein Memorial Lecture, 'Gravity from Strings and Strings from Gravity', in Stockholm on 22 October 2026.
- He is the ICTS-Infosys Madhava Chair Professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bengaluru.
Why it matters
[First] Awards to Indian scientists are a regular SSC and defence GK question. The medal dates from 1988 and its first three winners were Nobel laureates Chen-Ning Yang, Steven Weinberg and Hans Bethe. Sen is known for S-duality, black-hole entropy counting and string field theory. He already holds the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2012), the Dirac Medal (2014), the Padma Shri (2001) and the Padma Bhushan (2013). Link this to the string theory and quantum gravity basics in the explainer.