Deepak Dhar was born on October 30, 1951 in Pratapgarh, a small town
in the north-indian state of Uttar Pradesh. His early education was
in different schools in the state. He obtained his Bachelor of
Science from the University of Allahabad in 1970, and then went to
Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, from where he received his
Master's degree in Physics in 1972.

For his Ph.D., he went to California Institute of Technology,
Pasadena. During his graduate student years at Caltech, he was once a
teaching assistant for a graduate course on advanced quantum
mechanics taught by R. P.  Feynman. It was an unforgettable
experience. For his Ph.D.  thesis, he worked under the supervision of
Professor Jon Mathews. He proposed a model of melting of solids, and
studied the critical behavior of models defined on finitely ramified
fractals using the exact real-space renormalization group equations.  
He was the first to define the spectral dimension of fractals in
terms of the density of states of the phonon modes in these
systems. He also showed that the self-avoiding walk problem on such
fractals has a nontrivial critical behavior, and determined the exact
critical exponents.

After finishing his Ph.D., he returned to India, and joined Tata 
Institute of Fundamental Reserach in Mumbai as a post-doc in 1978. He
was made a regular member of the Institute in 1980, and has remained 
there since then. His current rank is Senior Professor. In 1984-85, 
he spent an year as Universite Pierre et Marie Curie as a visiting 
scientist.

At the Tata Institute, he started working on the problems in
disordered systems, in particular, the effect of disorder on the
relaxation in magnets.  In an important paper in 1983, he showed that
the long-time relaxation  in such magnets is dominated by the
very slow relaxation of rare regions of very strong bonds, and this
contribution decays in time much more slowly than a stretched
exponential.

In the early 80's, Dhar also worked on the problem of directed
percolation and directed animals.  Dhar, with colleagues M. Barma and
M.K.  Phani, used a computer to exhaustively enumerate the number of
connected directed site animals of n sites on a square lattice for
small n.  Using the exact values of these numbers for n up to 20,
they were able to conjecture the exact formula for general n. Later,
he was able to prove and generalize this result by establishing an
exact equivalence of this problem in any dimension d, with that of
determining the partition function of a hard-core lattice gas in one
lower dimension.

Dhar's most influential work has been in the area of self-organized
criticality. In the late eighties, Bak Tang and Wiesenfeld realized
that the steady states of many slowly driven non-equilibrium systems
show power-law correlations. They called this mechanism
self-organized criticality, and argued that it provides as a
framework to describe large fluctuations in many natural systems,
ranging from earthquakes to punctuated equilibrium in biological
evolution. They proposed a simple sandpile models, which was analysed
by computer simulations.  Soon after the initial paper of Bak et al,
Dhar and Ramaswamy solved exactly a directed variant of the sandpile
model.  He extended these results to a larger class of models in an
important paper in 1990. He showed that the model has a very
interesting abelian group structure, which allows the exact
calculation of many properties of the model. His studies of different
sandpile models established their connection to other well-studied
models of physics known as the voter and Potts models, and have
helped put the study of self-organized critical systems on a sound
theoretical basis.
 

Dhar is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National
Science Academy, and of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the
recipient of the Young Scientist award (1983), Shanti Swarup
Bhatnagar Prize in Physics (1991), the J.R. Schrieffer Prize of the
I.C.T.P. (1993),  the S. N. Bose medal of the Indian National
Science Academy (2001), and the T.W.A.S. award in Physics (2003).