Ritesh Agarwal, a professor in the department of materials science and engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, has been named the Srinivasa Ramanujan Distinguished Scholar. 

Dr. Agarwal earned a PhD from University of California, Berkeley and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University before joining Penn in 2005. His research interests include investigating structural, optical, and electronic properties of low-dimensional systems and the development of new probes to study complex phases of matter. Recently, his group has focused on studying the role of quantum geometry and topology in electronic and optical systems and to engineer light-matter interactions to fabricate on-chip photonic devices.

Dr. Agarwal has received the NSF CAREER Award, the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and the SPIE Symposium Nanoengineering Pioneer Award.  He was elected a fellow of the Optical Society of America in 2021 and is the 2022 recipient of Penn Engineering’s George H. Heilmeier Faculty Award for Excellence in Research.

The Srinivasa Ramanujan Distinguished Scholar chair was established to honor mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and his contributions to the analytical theory of numbers.