Professor Deepak Dhar has received the 2026 Dirac Medal from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, one of the top distinctions in theoretical physics. The award, established in 1985 and announced annually on Paul Dirac’s birthday, has previously gone to leading figures such as Stephen Hawking. This year Dhar shares the medal with Bernard Derrida, Marc Mézard and Haim Sompolinsky for advances in statistical mechanics and its applications to optimisation, neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
Born in 1951 in Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Dhar studied at Allahabad University and later at IIT Kanpur. He earned a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology in 1978, where he worked with Richard Feynman. After completing his studies, he returned to India to join the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. He later served as a professor at IISER Pune for nearly eight years and is now an INSA Distinguished Professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in Bengaluru.
Over four decades Dhar has contributed to statistical mechanics, notably through the sandpile model and its burning algorithm. The Dirac Medal joins his earlier honours, including the 2022 Boltzmann Medal, shared with John Hopfield, and the Padma Bhushan in 2023. He is the second Indian recipient after Ashoke Sen.
