AR-2020-21

14 33 rd ANNUAL REPORT 2020-21 family, I express our heartfelt condolences to the bereaved family and friends. They all will be remembered in the history of IUCAA. nd The 32 Foundation Day Lecture was delivered on Tuesday, December 29, 2020, by Professor Raghavendra Gadagkar, DST Year of Science Chair Professor at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Due to the ongoing restrictions, the lecture was held entirely online, with a liveYouTube stream that drew hundreds of viewers as well as a smaller, interactive audience on Zoom. Professor Gadagkar is an expert on Animal Behaviour, Ecology and Evolution, with more than three decades of experience focusing primarily on the origin and evolution of cooperation in animals, especially in social insects, such as ants, bees and wasps. In his lecture, titled `War and Peace: Conflict and Cooperation in an Insect Society', Professor Gadagkar presented examples of observations and experiments attempting to understand the workings of a particular tropical insect society, the Indian paper wasp ' Ropalidia marginata'. The recorded lecture is available at the YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHI0-xuQTc8. Among the members of IUCAA, Sanjeev V. Dhurandhar has been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, for foundational contributions to the theoretical underpinnings of gravitational wave detection, especially in data analysis techniques, and for the development of India's gravitational wave community leading to LIGO – India. Samir Dhurde (shared with Vivek Monteiro) has been presented the Zubin Kembhavi Award by the Astronomical Society of India, for the public outreach and education in astronomy and allied fields. Neeraj Gupta ( and team) has been given the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, for the research paper: A single fast radio burst localized to a massive galaxy at cosmological distance. th th Jayant V. Narlikar has been selected as the President of the 94 Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan (94 All India Marathi Literary Meet), and presented the Krishnaji Medal (Lecture Award), by the National Academy of Sciences, India. T. Padmanabhan has been given the Fifth Prize in the Gravity Research Foundation Essay Contest for: Principle of equivalence at Planck scales and the zero-point length of spacetime: A synergistic description of quantummatter and geometry . Kanak Saha, and Shyam N. Tandon (and team) have been bestowed the New DiscoveryAward, by theAstronomical Society of India, for their work on detection of Lyman continuumemission froma z = 1.42 galaxy usingAstroSat. Funded by the Ministry of Human Resources Development, Government of India, under the Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya National Mission on Teachers and Teaching Scheme, theAstronomy Centre for Educators, consisting of the National Resource Centre forA&A, and the Teacher Learning Centre, hosted at IUCAA, have developed onlineA&Acourses forAnnual Refresher Programme in Teaching (ARPIT). These online lecture courses are available on the SWAYAM platform for the University/College teachers. Large numbers of such teachers have taken advantage of these courses. IUCAA has continued to be in the forefront of science popularisation and outreach activities for high school students and the general public. Regular Lecture/Demonstration Programmes for local school students have been conducted, and are very popular. During this year, bounded by pandemic restrictions, we have been able to translate all these activities to online ones, and in the process have been reaching much larger numbers all over the country.. The National Science Day programmes consisted of various competitions for school students, demonstrations, lectures, posters and model presentations, night sky watching, etc., were conducted online for two days during February 28 and 29, 2021. Outreach activities included