In memoriam: Presidency physics family donates 20L to honour professor dad

Kolkata: New Jersey-based couple and senior alumni of the 1973 physics batch of Presidency College (now a university), Tapan and Arupa Ganguly, donated Rs 20 lakh to ramp up the infrastructure and support academic programmes at the school of astrophysics. The donation was made in memory of Arupa's father, P K Sen Choudhury, who was a physics professor at Presidency College and a well-known cosmic ray physicist. Both Tapan and Arupa are professors at the school of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. They got in touch with the school's assistant professor, Suchetana Chatterjee, last year and expressed their wish to contribute to the academic development of the department. "We were both students at the physics department of Presidency College between 1970 and 1973. My father was a professor in the department and taught us. He often said that the crème de la crème of students study at Presidency and was very affectionate towards his students," said Arupa.
Tapan shared that one of the other reasons for contributing to Presidency University was to stop bright students from shifting from the institution and the state for pursuing higher studies. "It was a shocking revelation to us a few years ago when we heard that students leave Presidency for other institutions like IITs to pursue engineering courses. So we thought of making this contribution to support the academic and research activities in a bid to bring back the past glory and motivate students to pursue research in basic science at the Presidency University. If our contribution can stop at least a few students from Bengal from moving out of the state and the university, we would consider our contribution to be meaningful," said Tapan. "Research needs passion, funding and a constant supply of good students and teachers. Through this contribution, we also wanted to encourage others to come forward and support our alma mater so that we can protect its excellence and glory," he added. According to Chatterjee, the money has been received in Feb. "About Rs 8 lakh will be utilised to upgrade two classrooms of the school of astrophysics, and they will be named after Professor P K Sen Choudhury. The remaining Rs 12 lakh will be kept as an endowment fund, and the yearly interest will be utilised purely for research activities of MSc and PhD students of the physics and astrophysics departments. We will support them in attending conferences, for paper publication charges, and buying necessary things such as a computer, books and journals," said Chatterjee.