Ramakrishna Ramaswamy

My undergraduate (B. Sc., Madras University) and graduate (M. Sc., Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur) education was in Chemistry. I obtained my Ph D from Princeton University in 1978, and was at Caltech as a postdoctoral fellow before returning to India in 1980, to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. Presently (since 1986) I am in the School of Physical Sciences at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

My main areas of research are:

• chaos and nonlinear dynamics in low dimensional systems.

  I am particularly interested at present in quasiperiodically driven systems and attractors which are fractal, but have nonchaotic motion.

• self-organizing systems and models of SOC.

  CA models of sandpiles, real granular materials, traffic jams, etc.

• dynamics of finite systems.

  phase changes in small clusters of atoms or molecules, phase transitions in finite systems.

• computational genomics.

  using methods of statistical physics in detecting short and long range correlations in DNA sequences. Implementing this in GeneScan, an ab initio genefinding algorithm that we have developed.

During the tenure of my International Fellowship, I hope to integrate some of these interests, particularly in studying the dynamics in realistic biological models of cells.