Padma Kant Shukla (7 July 1950 – 26 January 2013) was a distinguished Professor and first International Chair of the Physics and Astronomy Department of Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany. He was also the director of the International Centre for Advanced Studies in Physical Sciences at Ruhr-University Bochum. He held a PhD in physics from Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India and a second doctorate in Theoretical Plasma Physics from Umeå University in Sweden.
Padma Kant Shukla was born in the village Tulapur (near Chunar district Mirzapur) near Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India and was educated there. After his PhD in physics from Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India at the age of 22, he moved to Umeå University, Sweden in January 1972, and obtained his second doctorate degree in Theoretical Plasma Physics there in 1975. He has lived in Bochum and worked at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany starting January 1973, becoming a German Citizen in 1993. During his marriage life with wife Ranjana Shukla he had three sons.
Shukla has received honorary doctorates from the Prasidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow) and the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a fellow of the Institute of Physics (UK), and a corresponding fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Scotland, UK), a foreign member of the Physics Class of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and an associate fellow/member of the World Academy for the Advancement of Sciences in the Developing World (Trieste, Italy). He has been awarded the 2005 American Physical Society Dweight Nicholson Medal for the Human Outreach through Physics, a 2011 APS Outstanding Referee, and is recipient of the 2006 Gay-Lussac-Humboldt-Prize from the French Ministry of Education and Research. He is the first laureate of the 22nd Khwarizmi International Award from the IROST, Iran.
Shukla has been a faculty member in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany starting January 1973, where he was a Physics Professor and held an International Chair and Directorship of the International Centre for Advanced Studies in Physical Sciences at Ruhr-University Bochum.
Shukla held an adjunct professorship of engineering sciences at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, US; an adjunct physics professorship at the Department of Physics & Astronomy, Delhi University, India; visiting professorships at the Department of Physics, Umeå University, Sweden; and at the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance (SUPA) Department of Physics, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland (UK). He holds an invited full professorship at GoLP/Centre for Plasma Physics and Nuclear Fusion, Instituto Superior Technico, Technical University
of Lisbon, Portugal; an honorary professorship at the School of Chemistry and Physics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa..
He was a theoretical plasma physicist with research interests in multidisciplinary sciences including basic and nonlinear physics, nonlinear geophysical flows, atmospheric physics and environmental sciences, soft-condensed matter physics and matter wave solitons, high-energy density physics, nonlinear phenomena in quantum systems, plasma astrophysics and neutrino-plasma physics, plasma-based high-energy charged particle acceleration, intense photon-photon and photon-plasma interactions, and fusion physics. He has published extensively (70 review papers and 1450 papers in more than sixty journals, including Nature, Nature Physics, Reviews of Modern Physics, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review, Physics of Plasmas, Physics Letters A, receiving over 21,200 citations, with the Hirsch Index=62) on various aspects of theoretical and computational plasma physics, as well as numerous novel phenomena involving wave-wave and wave-particle interactions in the physical sciences.
He has coauthored the textbook, Introduction to Dusty Plasma Physics, and edited or co-edited 15 books and several (18) Special Issues of various journals. He was the discoverer of the dust acoustic wave in dusty plasmas and novel attractive force between ions at atomic dimensions in quantum plasmas. He has more than 30 years of experience in committee work both at national and international levels.
Since 1989, Shukla has been a co-organizer/director of the plasma physics activities (Summer Colleges and Workshops in Plasma Physics) at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (AS-ICTP), Trieste (Italy), Chairman of the International Advisory Committee of the International Conference on Physics of Dusty Plasmas (ICPDP), and International Advisory Committee member of the International Congress on Plasma Physics (ICPP). He has presented over 130 keynote, plenary, tutorial, and topical lectures in international conferences, including European Physical Society, American Physical Society, ICPP, ICPDP, Summer Colleges and Workshops at the AS-ICTP.
Shukla has contributed to education, and basic and applied physics in developing countries across the globe. He has served (2008-2011) as Chairman of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) C.16 Commission on Plasma Physics, and (starting 2008) as Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Emerging Nations Science Foundation (Trieste, Italy), as Editor-in-Chief of J. Plasma Physics (Cambridge University Press, UK), as editorial board member of Physical Review E (American Physical Society), as associate editor of Physics of Plasmas (American Institute of Physics), and was a member of the International Advisory Panel of Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion (Institute of Physics, Bristol, UK).
P. K. Shukla and B. Eliasson, "Novel attractive force between ions in quantum plasmas", "Phys. Rev. Lett." '"108"', 165007 (2012) (5 pages); Erratum: PRL 108, 219902(E) (2012); PRL 109, 019901 (E) (2012) (1 page).
I. Zeba, M. E. Yahia, P. K. Shukla, W. M. Moslem, Electron–hole two-stream instability in quantum semiconductor plasma with exchange-correlation effects; Physics Letters A 376 (2012) 2309–2313.
P. K. Shukla and B. Eliasson. "Nonlinear collective interactions in quantum plasmas with degenerate electron fluids", "Rev. Mod. Phys." 83, 885-906 (2011). SCI=58 (Source Google Scholar).
P. K. Shukla and K. Avinash. "Phase coexistence and a critical point in ultracold-neutral plasmas", "Phys. Rev. Lett." 107, 135002 (2011) [5 pages].
P. K. Shukla and B. Eliasson. "Nonlinear aspects of quantum plasma physics", "Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk" 180, 55–82 (2010) [Eng. Translation]: Phys. Usp 53, 51–76 (2010). SCI=159 (Source Google Scholar).
P. K. Shukla and B. Eliasson. "Fundamentals of dust-plasma interactions", Rev. Mod. Phys. 81, 25–44 (2009). SCI=213 (Source Google Scholar).
P. K. Shukla. "A new spin in quantum plasmas", Nature Phys. 5, 92–93 (2009). SCI=58 (Source Google SCholar).
D. Shaikh and P. K. Shukla. "Fluid turbulence in quantum plasmas", Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 125002 (2007) [4 pages]. SCI=72 (Google Scholar).