Education
- Ph.D: Physics, (1979), State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY - Stony Brook, NY
- MA: Physics, (1976), State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY - Stony Brook, NY
- BS: Physics, (1974), Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur - Kharagpur, India
Biosketch
Partha Chowdhury is Interim Head of Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He joined UMass Lowell as an Associate Professor of Physics in 1995 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2000. He has served as Interim Vice-Provost for Research (2007-09), Assistant Chair of Physics (2011-14), Graduate Coordinator of Physics (2014-17), and Chair of Physics (2020-23).
His research interests lie in experimental nuclear science, both fundamental and applied. For the former, his focus is on the quantum structure and fragility of the nuclei of the heaviest atoms, synthesized at national heavy-ion accelerator facilities and studied via gamma-ray spectroscopic techniques. This research has received continual funding from the U.S. Department of Energy for his entire career at UMass Lowell since 1995. On the applied side, his interest is in developing novel detectors for neutrons and gamma rays, for both imaging and spectroscopy, through industry partnerships that have been funded by federal Small Business Innovation Research grants as well as the National Nuclear Security Agency. Since 2008, he has directed the Radiation Laboratory research center on campus, which comprises of a 1-megawatt research reactor and a 5.5-megavolt particle accelerator.
He has served on scientific review panels of federal funding agencies in USA, Canada and the UK, as well as a reviewer for multiple scientific journals. He has served as elected Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Nuclear Chemistry as well as the New England Section of the American Physical Society.
He has served on the advisory board for the ADVANCE Office of Faculty Equity at UMass Lowell and led the membership of the Physics department in the Inclusion, Diversity and Equity Alliance of the American Physical Society (APS-IDEA) national network.
He received his B.Sc.(Hons) degree in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from Stony Brook University in New York. His postdoctoral training was at Argonne National Laboratory and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. Prior to joining UMass Lowell, he was Assistant Professor at Yale University and Wellesley College. He is a member of the American Physical Society and the American Association of Physics Teachers.