Quick Facts
Biography
P. I. John is a prominent Indian plasma physicist. He occupies the Meghnad Saha Chair in Plasma Science and Technology at the Institute for Plasma Research.
After completing his Ph.D. at Aligarh Muslim University, John joined the Physical Research Laboratory, where he established an experimental plasma physics program in 1972. He was the Chairman of the Plasma Physics Group at PRL until 1982.
John was one of the leading members of the group who initiated India’s Fusion Research Program, also known as Plasma Physics Program (PPP), which developed into the Institute for Plasma Research (IPR). He supervised, and was instrumental in, the erection and commissioning of the first indigenously built Indian Tokamak, Aditya, and was also the project leader of its pulsed power systems.
In the early 1990s, he started a plasma processing program at the Institute for Plasma Research (IPR) to facilitate plasma based industrial applications, which grew into the Facilitation Centre for Industrial Plasma Technologies (FCIPT) at Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India. He was the head of FCIPT for many years, and is still a member of its governing Council.
In 2002-03, John served as Head of the Physics Section of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He was also part of the Indian Task Force for ITER negotiations, before India joined the ITER as a full member. Currently, also, he is chairman of the Board Of Research in Fusion Science & Technology (BRFST), which is involved with the National Fusion Program in India. Through the National Fusion Program, John was reported in 2010 to be "currently working on an administrative framework for funding universities and educational institutions in basic research, and human resource development in fusion science and technology."
John has supervised many doctoral students and has authored and co-authored numerous scientific articles published in international and national journals. He also holds a number of patents and wrote the book Plasma Sciences and the Creation of Wealth.
He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Gujarat Academy of Science. In 2010, Professor John received the prestigious Padma Shri award from the Government of India.
John also writes poetry, and some of his poems can be read on his blogs.