LAUSR

Theoretical condensed matter physicist Jainendra K. Jain was born and raised in the rural village of Sambhar in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan. Jain recalls that despite the poor educational infrastructure in his school, he fell in love with physics. “The stories of Einstein and Indian physicists Bose and Raman had worked their magic on me,” he says. “I used to stay up late at night solving physics problems. I found the beauty of physics in the economy of its explanation.” Jain was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021 and now serves as the Evan Pugh University Professor and Erwin W. Mueller Professor of Physics at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, where he has taught since 1998.