Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Rajagopala Chidambaram, one of the most distinguished crystallographers of our era, and an outstanding leader of science in India, passed away on the 4th January 2025.Both of us have known Chidambaram for a long time.SCM met him for the first time in 1982 during the National Seminary on Crystallography in Nagpur, while SCM was still a final year Bachelor's student in college.Chidambaram then explained to SCM the beauty of understanding geometric relationships among atoms in molecules in order to understand the properties of materials.TPS met him for the first time at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (IISc) while pursuing a PhD in physics in 1971.Chidambaram had obtained his PhD from the same department in IISc several years before.He was also the PhD thesis examiner of TPS and a frequent visitor to IISc in the following years.Chidambaram was born in 1936 in Chennai (formerly Madras) and received his initial education in Chennai.Later, he received his PhD from the IISc, Bangalore.He once recounted a fascinating story of how he was lost as a child in Prayagraj (Allahabad) and later reunited with his family.Chidambaram started his independent professional career in 1962 at the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay (AEET), later renamed as the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Mumbai.He initially began his work using neutron diffraction and high-pressure physics and soon established a vibrant group addressing structural analysis of materials.He initiated multiple lines of crystallographic analyses on materials using both X-rays and neutrons.By carrying out a comparative analysis of these techniques, he initially addressed questions related to hydrogen bonding by water in crystals and showed that, in the crystalline state, bent hydrogen bonds are preferred over distortion of the geometry of the H-O-H angle.He soon shifted his attention to creating high pressures on crystals and made a diamond anvil cell for the same.These studies continue at the XRD-2 beamline at the Elettra synchrotron radiation source using a similar diamond anvil cell, constructed under the India-Italy collaboration.He rose to become Director of BARC in 1990 and later moved to New Delhi as the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1993.He was appointed as the Principal Scientific Advisor (PSA) to the Government of India in 2002, a position that he held for close to 17 years.He also served as the Chairman of the Board of Governors of
Authors: Shekhar C. Mande, Tej P. Singh
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4407809917