Smrithan Ravichandran, an Indian American doctoral researcher, who studies how electrons move in some of the strongest laser fields achievable on planet Earth, has won a top University of Maryland honor.
Ravichandran, an Indian Institute of Technology, Madras alumnus, is also studying how to use that information to make fundamental measurements of the vacuum that makes up most of the universe.
He won the 2026 College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS) Board of Visitors Outstanding Graduate Student Award for demonstrating scholarly and research excellence.
Ravichandran and other 2026 employee award recipients were celebrated at an awards ceremony on May 1. This year’s awardees were selected from a pool of hundreds of nominations from the Science Terp community.
Read: Four Indian American researchers win 2026 Florida University honors(May 1, 2026)
For his bachelor thesis project at IIT Madras, Ravichandran worked with Prof. Sivarama Krishnan’s research group on exploring the Gouy phase shift of a Gaussian laser beam, studying ionization processes of nitrogen and argon clusters with intense femtosecond light pulses and time-of-flight spectrometry, according to his LinkedIn profile.
As a Summer Research Intern at Aarhus University, Denmark, he worked with Prof. Marcel Mudrich’s research group on implementing second order autocorrelation processes to measure the temporal pulse width of a femtosecond laser.
As a Summer Research Intern at Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Germany, he worked on current sampling of femtosecond infrared pulses by varying relative time delay with attosecond XUV pulses on dielectric media.
Ravichandran also served as Summer Research Intern at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. There he worked with Prof. Randolf Pohl’s research group on implementing a set-up to characterize a charge-coupled device (CCD) sensor of a camera, which was then used to perform absorption imaging of lithium atom clouds in a magneto-optical trap.
As a Graduate Research Assistant at Institute for Physical Science and Technology College Park, Maryland, he performed Teaching Assistant duties for an introductory course in physics for students of the life sciences.