Professor Shivaji Sondhi, a faculty associate of the James Madison Program, has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society.
Sondhi is the Wykeham Professor at the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford and Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton University. He is a theoretical physicist whose work has primarily focused on novel forms of order in many-body systems – both naturally occurring and those enabled by advances in experimental techniques.
In addition to his research, he has a long-standing interest in public policy issues. At Princeton, he co-founded programs on oil, energy, and the Middle East, and on India and the world. At Oxford, he is actively engaged in exploring the implications of the explosive growth of machine intelligence for human arrangements.
The Royal Society is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfills a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, recognizing excellence in science, supporting outstanding science, providing scientific advice for policy, education, and public engagement, and fostering international and global cooperation. Founded in 1660, it was granted a royal charter by King Charles II and is the oldest continuously existing scientific academy in the world.