UNM physicist Nitant Kenkre recognized for lifetime achievements
August 22, 2022 - Steve Carr
It was in the winter of 1984 when a young physicist named Vasudev “Nitant” Kenkre wandered onto the campus at The University of New Mexico. Since then, Kenkre, who has been described as a physicist, humanist, humorist, magician, philosopher, scholar, writer, and more, has made an indelible mark in the world of interdisciplinary science not only at UNM but worldwide.
The latest recognition he has received is a Kenkre Festschrift: a book of research articles on various areas of interdisciplinary science his work has inspired, published in his honor by colleagues and students from all over the world. It has appeared as an entire issue of the International Journal of Modern Physics B published by World Scientific. This is a rare recognition indeed, the kind that only the most admired scientists in the international community receive in their lifetime.
Physics wasn’t his first choice when he thought about what he wanted to do when growing up as a young child in India. At the time, he was attuned to the humanities more than to the hard sciences, which would later shape his career as well as his life.
“I thought highly of the humanities and poorly of the sciences when I was a kid,” Kenkre recalled. “I wanted to be a poet, at least a writer in general, dabbling in languages and literature, nothing like a physicist.”
That all changed with some truly brilliant teaching in the field of mathematics by an instructor named Joe Menezes, whose inspired insights were responsible for Kenkre’s path getting into the sciences, more precisely into theoretical physics applied to various interdisciplinary subjects.
Kenkre, who is an Indian, and native of Goa (a former Portuguese colony in India) was educated there as well as in Bombay, now Mumbai, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1968. He left India then to pursue theoretical physics in the USA. He earned his Master’s and Ph.D. in physics, both in 1971 at SUNY at Stony Brook where he also began his incredible teaching career. He moved to the University of Rochester the following year and spent the next 12 years as an assistant and associate professor before moving to the high desert.
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