G Bhamathi, 2024-12-09, 2025-01-22

Gopalakrishnan Bhamathi, born on 2 May 1938, is a theoretical physicist. She received her PhD in Theoretical Physics at the University of Madras in 1962 and went on to do a postdoc in Boulder, Colorado 1963. After a year, she was appointed as Pool Officer in the Theory division of the Physics Department at the University of Madras and became a faculty member there in 1966. Subsequently, she became a Professor in the same department. Her research focused on nuclear and particle physics. She was the head of the Space Science Cell at the University of Madras from 1979 to 1987. She took early retirement from the University of Madras in 1992 and moved to Texas. The same year, she married ECG Sudarshan, an Indian-American physicist, and continued her research at the University of Texas.

Bhamathi has held visiting positions at the University of Oxford, UK, University of Alberta, Canada, University de Libre, Belgium, and more. She has also held teaching positions at UC Irvine, University of Chile, University of Texas, and Austin Community College. Over the course of her career, she authored more than a hundred scientific papers.

She has been involved in community work in Austin, serving on the women’s commission for the city and co-founding Saheli (now AFSSA), a non-profit organisation to help persons facing family violence in the Austin South Asian community. An avid music lover, she also founded a music group, Vidyadhara, and teaches Carnatic music in Austin. She has organised and run the Austin Thyagaraja Aradhana event for the last 33 years.