24/08/2026
At 12, Jainendra K Jain lost his mother in a tram accident in Kolkata. He was badly injured too. The accident left him with a lifelong disability.
For a boy growing up in Sambhar, a small town on the edge of Rajasthan’s Thar Desert, the road ahead could have looked very different.
But Mr Jain walked again with the help of the low-cost Jaipur Foot. And he went back to studying.
As a child, a magazine story about physicist Satyendra Nath Bose and his interaction with Albert Einstein sparked his fascination with physics. That curiosity stayed with him and shaped his path.
Mr Jain studied at Maharaja College in Jaipur, IIT Kanpur and Stony Brook University in the US.
Then, in 1989, as a young postdoctoral researcher at Yale University, Mr Jain had an idea that would change modern physics.
While thinking about the mysterious behaviour of electrons under powerful magnetic fields, he proposed that electrons could combine with tiny quantum vortices to form new particles. He called them “composite fermions”.
The idea explained a major puzzle in quantum physics and went on to become a central concept in the field.
More than three decades later, in 2025, that breakthrough earned him the prestigious Wolf Prize in Physics. The honour made Mr Jain the first person of Indian origin to receive the Wolf Prize in Physics.
Later, he went on to become a leading physicist at Pennsylvania State University. Mr Jain is also the founding director of the Lodha Theoretical Physics Institute in Mumbai.
His story began with loss, injury, pain and uncertainty. It eventually took him, and the nation, to the frontiers of quantum physics.
