You may have heard by now that we lost Professor A.P. Balachandran on April 18 at Coimbatore, India. He was a Joel Dorman Steele Emeritus Professor and an internationally renowned theoretical physicist.

Professor Balachandran joined Syracuse University in 1964 and was instrumental in establishing our theoretical physics research group. Throughout his career, he supervised over 40 PhD students, mentored numerous postdoctoral associates, and authored over 200 research papers and books. His work spanned a variety of subfields in high energy physics, including pion-nucleon scattering, topological ideas in quantum field theory, skyrmions, quantum Hall effect, and noncommutative geometry.

He received several awards, including the Award of the American Chapter of the Indian Physics Association for Contributions to Physics and the Chancellor's Citation for Exceptional Academic Achievement. In 1988, he was selected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Beyond his academic achievements, Professor Balachandran was known for his sensibility, cultural awareness, and political activism. He will be deeply missed by all who know him, and his impact on the academic community and his students continues to be deeply felt.

Dr. Indra Balachandran and family, in collaboration with Hendricks Chapel and the Physics Department, hosted a moving memorial to honor Professor Balachandran's life and legacy on October 10. The service was attended by family, colleagues, and former students, including Professor Parameswaran Nair, Distinguished Professor of Physics at City College of New York. Professor Nair, one of Bal's former students, shared reflections on the significance of his life and work and also presented a colloquium about Bal's scientific contributions. Professor Nair also wrote a wonderful account of Bal's life and scientific legacy, which you can read on arXiv. Many of Bal's closest friends, family members, and collaborators offered tributes and memories.

Donald Salisbury, who earned his PhD under Peter Bergmann in 1977, recently reached out to share that Dr. Balachandran played a significant role in his own development beginning when he enrolled in graduate school in 1968. Dr. Salisbury, now Emeritus Professor of Physics at Austin College and an American Physical Society Fellow, expressed his appreciation and admiration for Dr. Balachandran and his family, noting the achievements of his immediate family, including his wife Indra's receipt of the Cytotechnology Award and their son Vinod's work as a world leader in pancreatic cancer research.

You can watch the memorial service here. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to the Food Bank of Central New York.