Prof. Sashi Satpathy obtained his PhD in physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1982, his MSc from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1977, and his BSc from Utkal University, India. After several years of postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute, Stuttgart, and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, California, he joined the physics department at the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1987 as an assistant professor, where he is currently a curators’ distinguished professor of physics. Prof. Satpathy’s research area is theoretical condensed matter physics. He has over 150 publications in scientific journals and has mentored about 20 doctoral and postdoctoral scholars over his career. Well known for a number of seminal contributions to the electronic structure theory of solids as well as to the photonic band structure, Prof. Satpathy uses both numerical and analytical tools to study contemporary problems in condensed matter physics. Recent examples are strong spin-orbit coupled systems, orbital Hall and spin Hall effects, and the physics of the skyrmions. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Physics, London.
Carrying information using spin and orbital transport, as opposed to the standard charge transport, is an emerging area of research in condensed matter physics, which has the potential to revolutionize future electronics. Prof. Satpathy’s Fulbright-Nehru project is developing a fundamental understanding about orbital transport, specifically about the orbital Hall effect, which involves transport of orbital moments. Toward this, theoretical models are being developed and the results are being validated through calculations based on the density functional theory.