Prof. Sohini Kar-Narayan

Prof. Sohini Kar-Narayan is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems where she leads an interdisciplinary research group working on functional nanomaterials and devices for energy, sensing, and biomedical applications. She is also an Honorary Professor at Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg, and Professor of Device Materials at the University of Cambridge, UK. She received her PhD in Physics from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore in 2009, and was awarded a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship in 2012. She was the recipient of a World Economic Forum Young Scientist Award and a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant in 2015 and also an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2023. Prof. Kar-Narayan received the Royal Society of Chemistry Peter Day Prize in 2023 and was recognized as one of the Top 50 Women in Engineering of 2021 by the Women’s Engineering Society. She was elected Fellow of the the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2024. She is also a Professorial Fellow of Clare Hall College in Cambridge. Prof. Kar-Narayan is a Co-Founder and Director of ArtioSense Ltd., a Cambridge University spin-out that seeks to commercialize microfluidic force sensors for precision orthopedic surgery, for which she was awarded the Armourers & Brasiers’ Venture Prize Award in 2022 and the Institute of Physics Lee Lucas Award in 2023. She was named “Innovator of the Year” at the 2024 Electronics Weekly Women Leaders in Electronics Awards and has been awarded the 2025 Royal Microscopical Society AFM and SPM Award. She is the Editor-in-Chief of APL Electronic Devices.