We are delighted to welcome back Dr. Bobby Acharya at Imperial, this time as a Kibble Fellow.
It is of course no coincidence if we choose the Autumn 2026 issue of our Salam Newsletter who is dedicated to Tom Kibble to also celebrate our first Kibble Fellow Bobby Acharya. Bobby learnt all the mysteries of Advanced Quantum Field Theory by none other than Tom Kibble in 1993-1994. But while the Salam Centre and Kibble's legacy keep a special place in Bobby's journey, his story is so rich it spans continents, cultures, fields and even spacetime dimensions. There are few who span such a breadth and yet bring such precision and deep dedication to everything they do.
Bobby was born in Uganda, though as a child he was among the many Ugandan Asians who sought refuge in London during the Idi Amin dictatorship. Whether London has become or will become a second home to him is for us to find out - but it is there that theoretical physics found that theoretical physics managed to get hold of him. Driven by his passion, he completed his QFFF MSc at Imperial, before moving to QMUL for his PhD, where he worked on Joyce compactifications of string and M-theory with Chris Hull, and met many members of the theory group who later all moved simultaneously to Imperial.
Now a Professor and Senior Research Scientist at ICTP since 2004, there is a certain symmetry to the ICTP-Imperial duality: the two centres of theoretical physics founded by Abdus Salam have both played defining roles in Bobby's life.
Bobby's research lies at the frontier of M-theory and mathematical physics. He pioneered the study of G2-manifolds and special holonomy spaces, work that has deepened our understanding of confinement and the nature of chiral fermions, while opening new directions in geometry and topology. He was a PI and executive committee member of the Simons Collaboration on Special Holonomy in Geometry, Analysis and Physics, supported by a $14M Simons Foundation grant. At the same time, as founder of the ICTP ATLAS group, he has led significant contributions to measurements of the top quark and Higgs boson at the LHC - a unique and distinguished combination of mathematical depth and experimental application.
But perhaps equally remarkable is his commitment to building physics beyond the traditional centres of the field. He founded and developed several projects aimed at fostering science, education and research in low and middle income countries, including the African School of Fundamental Physics and Applications, which has taken place across the continent - from South Africa to Ghana, Senegal, Rwanda, Namibia, Morocco, and most recently Kenya - and has been a driving force behind the ICTP Physics Without Frontiers programme. In recognition of these efforts, he was awarded the Lawrence Bragg Gold Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics in 2018.
In addition to collaborating with members of the Centre and conducting groundbreaking research, as a Kibble Fellow Bobby will help strengthen the connection between ICTP and the Salam Centre at Imperial, Bobby will help strengthen the connection between ICTP and the Salam Centre at Imperial, particularly through the Salam Fellow programme and new opportunities for ICTP students. We very much look forward to collaborating with him.
When asked about re-joining Salam's Centre at Imperial, Bobby reflected, in the most modest and yet profound way: "It's nice that the two centres of theoretical physics founded by Salam have played a key role in my life." But that doesn't even begin to capture just how lucky theoretical physics is to have found Bobby.