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Surajit Sen holds a B.Sc (Hons) from Presidency College, Calcutta and a PhD from The University of Georgia. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and Michigan State University before joining the physics faculty at the State University of New York at Buffalo where he has been a full professor since 2006. His research is on nonequilibrium processes and nonlinear dynamical systems as realized in nature and in social contexts. These works include studies on interactions between solitary waves, the likely existence of a new equilibrium-like state with large scale fluctuations, impulse acoustics based imaging of buried landmines, impact mitigation and sound dampening using granular metamaterials and studies of battle strategy and primate societies. He is deeply interested in raising awareness about science and math in children and youth from the underserved communities. His work has appeared in some 160 refereed journal articles and discussed in about as many invited lectures in conferences, academic institutions, and government labs in the US and around the world. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and of the American Association of the Advancement of Science and has been a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow at the Indian Institute of Engineering, Science and Technology in 2017-2018. Dr. Sen is an editor of the journal Granular Matter and an editorial board member of journals Modern Physics Letters B and International Journal of Modern Physics B. His university service includes chairing the promotion and tenure process in arts and sciences at Buffalo, being involved in human rights of scientists through the APS and in structuring bi-national science collaboration programs between individual academics. He is a past two-term president of the American Chapter of the Indian Physics Association and a former member of the executive committee of the Forum on International Physics of the APS.
USAID Profile
Bureau for Development, Democracy and Innovation/Local, Faith and Transformative Partnerships Hub/Locally Led Development Initiatives
USAID's Local, Faith and Transformative Partnerships (LFT) Hub focuses on supporting new partnerships and locally led development initiatives across the world. Surajit is spending his JSF year working on four activities at USAID, with two being at the research and education end with regard to the broader USAID mission on supporting development and the other two being linked directly to ongoing programmatic activities at USAID. At the research end, he is interested in ways to understand how successful development processes at the regional scale typically work across time and space at the systems level. This research endeavors to connect with ongoing USAID supported work. The second, an education project is exploring the possibility of introducing the work of USAID to high school seniors across the nation. This effort cuts across offices such as the Youth Corps, Education, the Diplomats in Residence program and as well as other offices at USAID and the State Department. The following two efforts directly connect with ongoing activities at USAID. (i) The involvement in proposal evaluation for new research initiatives under USAID's Broad Agency Announcement for Locally Led Development Innovation and in the Center for Education, and (ii) in co-organizing the Standards of Evidence for Locally Led Development Webinar series which is organizing agency-wide webinars to help facilitate a sustained dialog on the emerging good practices for empowering local actors in monitoring, evaluation and learning from diverse initiatives. In addition, Surajit makes himself available for support with regard to a range of ongoing initiatives across the LFT Hub and USAID, including, American Schools and Hospitals Abroad, Ocean Plastics related work and Youth Corp programs.
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