Rahul Chajwa, a former ICTS graduate student, has received the TAA-Geeta Udgaonkar Award (2021) for the best thesis in physical sciences within TIFR. Rahul’s thesis, titled ‘Driven Stokesian Suspensions: Particle Anisotropy, Effective Inertia an Transient Growth’ is based on experimental and theoretical work done under the supervision of Profs. Rama Govindarajan (ICTS-TIFR), Narayanan Menon (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Sriram Ramaswamy (IISc). The work, which began when Rahul and his supervisors were at TIFR Hyderabad, is on Stokesian sedimentation of interacting anisotropic particles, and provides rare experimental evidence of nonlinear instability driven by the transient growth of disturbances in a linearly stable but non-normal system.
The TAA-Geeta Udgaonkar Award was established in 1983 by former TIFR professor, B.M. Udgaonkar in memory of his late daughter. The awardees are felicitated every year on October 30, TIFR’s Founder’s Day.
Rahul is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, USA.