Physicist Ashoke Sen becomes the first Indian to win the Oskar Klein Medal

Ashoke Sen, a professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in Bengaluru, has been awarded the 2026 Oskar Klein Medal — the first Indian physicist to receive the honour, which Stockholm University and the Nobel Committee for Physics have given since 1988 to names like Stephen Hawking and Peter Higgs. Sen helped build modern string theory, the idea that the universe's basic building blocks are tiny vibrating strings rather than points, including a way of precisely counting what happens inside black holes. He received the medal in Stockholm after delivering the Oskar Klein Memorial Lecture, 'Gravity from strings and strings from gravity'.