The American Physical Society recently named its latest cohort of Fellows, with at least seven Indian American and Indian-origin academics among the group.

The APS Fellowship Program was created to recognize members who may have made advances in physics through original research and publication, or made significant innovative contributions in the application of physics to science and technology.

They may also have made significant contributions to the teaching of physics or service and participation in the activities of the society, APS said.

Fellowship is a distinct honor signifying recognition by one's professional peers. Each year, no more than one half of 1 percent of the society’s membership (excluding student members) is recognized by their peers for election to the status of Fellow of the American Physical Society, it noted.

Among the Fellows named were Rana X. Adhikari of the California Institute of Technology. Adhikari was named for numerous and crucial contributions to the improvement of the sensitivity and performance of the Initial, Enhanced and Advanced LIGO detectors, and the design and development of gravitational-wave detectors beyond Advanced LIGO, and to the mentoring of a new generation of scientists.

Benjamin Chandran of the University of New Hampshire was named for fundamental contributions to the theory of turbulence, heating, particle acceleration and thermal conduction in space and astrophysical plasmas.

Shailesh Chandrasekharan of Duke University was named for developing new ideas to solve sign problems in strongly correlated massless Dirac fermion systems, and for constructing new fermion Monte Carlo algorithms that have helped to accurately study fermionic quantum critical behavior in 2+1 dimensions and to discover exotic quantum critical points.

Nazir P. Kherani of the University of Toronto was named for distinct contributions to the development of betavoltaic, photovoltaic, and nanoplasmonic devices for long-lived batteries, high efficiency Si heterojunction solar cells, graded gratings for high sensitivity bio/chem-sensing applications, and contributions to understanding the Staebler- Wronski effect.

Aditi Mitra of New York University was named for pioneering theoretical studies of out-of-equilibrium quantum systems, including nonequilibrium criticality, topological phenomena under time-periodic driving, and the dynamics of entanglement statistics.

Abhay P. Narayan of Columbia University was named for the innovative use of scanning tunneling spectroscopy to elucidate the physics of electronic order in quantum materials.

Parans M. Paranthaman of Oak Ridge National Laboratory was named for distinguished contributions to the field of materials synthesis and characterization for high temperature superconductors, solar cells, lithium ion batteries, and additive manufacturing of magnetic materials.

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