Careers
Professor Asoke Nandi
Position: David Jardine Chair of Signal Processing
Organisation: Department of Electrical Engineering & Electronics
University of Liverpool
I was born and brought up in a place called Haripal, near Kolkata, India. Even before I went to school, I was fascinated by numbers. I was the youngest in a large family. It is difficult to be sure about the timing, but certainly before I was eight years old (after that I went to secondary school), I discovered (it took place on a sunny morning below the overhang of a mango tree on the roof of the oldest block in our parental home) my middle sister was doing algebra and calculus. I was greatly attracted by their generalities and conceptual constructs. I was 'surrounded' by science and my interest in science grew over a time - our house was full of books and many of these were about science and on the lives of scientists. My father and the eldest brother were doctors, another brother was an electrical engineer and the third brother was then studying medicine. My first heightened interest in physics arose when I was taught Newton's theory of gravity (I can still remember this day at my secondary school, Haripal Gurudayal Institution; I was 13 years old then). That was when I decided to study physics in a university. My desire to understand has always been strong, and physics and mathematics (here, I include statistics) have largely been the basis for the underlying modelling to create a structure for my understanding. I was fortunate to have had excellent teachers at school who were extremely able, enthusiastic and challenging. I have a lot of respects for them and I have good relations with them. Even now when I go back (that is not very often), I visit them.
I finished my school at the age of sixteen and I was going on to study a physics honours degree at the university of Calcutta. Unfortunately it was at the height of the war between West Pakistan (now called Pakistan) and East Pakistan (now called Bangladesh), and millions of refugees came to our part. There were a lot of political, structural and social unrests; universities were not functioning properly. It was a frustrating and worrying time. After a year I came to England with non-standard (in England) qualifications (no A-levels, though I got the highest total mark in the school), having left school at 16 (fewer years of schooling) and at a non-standard time of the academic year (near the end of October). With the help of my engineer brother, who lived then, and still lives, in London, and the Head of the Physics department, I enrolled for a Applied Physics BSc (Honours) degree course in what is now called South Bank university. I found the course easy and I read a lot outside the course - number theory, astronomy, special theory of relativity, particle physics and general theory of relativity. Also I had the opportunity to work with some professors at University College London, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (doing particle physics) and Daresbury Laboratory (doing particle physics). I tremendously enjoyed these outside experiences, the thrill of research, the research culture and seeing my name in print in research papers. In due course, I was awarded the top first class degree. At this stage I had been awarded a full scholarship to go to Canada and do research in general relativity leading to the degree of PhD as well as a full scholarship by the Trinity College, Cambridge, to do research in particle physics in the Cavendish Laboratory leading to the degree of PhD.
I chose to go to Cambridge where I met Marion, my wife-to-be. My efforts centred on the investigation of antiproton-proton and negatively-charged pion-proton interactions at 100 GeV/c. My research took me to USA and Europe, and in due course I was awarded the degree of PhD. Afterwards I was appointed as a Research Associate in particle physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory for five years. I spent a lot of my time at the European Centre for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, studying proton-antiproton collisions at the then highest energy at the SPS Collider. In 1983 we discovered the three fundamental particles known as W+, W- and Z° providing the evidence for the unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces, which was recognized by the Nobel Committee for Physics in 1984. In the same year I was awarded a five-year Advanced Fellowship by the Science and Engineering Research Council. At the beginning I joined the Department of Physics, Queen Mary College (University of London) and was seconded to CERN, and later I joined the Department of Nuclear Physics (University of Oxford).
A big change in my career took place in 1987 when I joined the Imperial College, London, as the Solartron Lecturer in the Signal Processing Section of the Electrical Engineering Department. Although particle physics is very different from signal processing, for me the bridge was mathematics, statistics, data processing, modelling, motivation and adaptability. First I had to learn a lot of new things - signals, noise, detection, estimation, prediction, etc. At Imperial, I got my first research student, research grant, research fellow and first research paper in signal processing. I thoroughly enjoyed all these but I did not like the daily commuting. In 1991, I moved to the Signal Processing Division of the Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department in the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, as a Senior Lecturer; subsequently, I was appointed a Reader in 1995 and a Professor in 1998. In March 1999 I moved to the University of Liverpool, Liverpool, to take up the appointment to the David Jardine Chair of Signal Processing in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics where I am the Head of the Signal Processing and Communications Research group. The luxury in my job is that I continually learn new things, work with fine young minds (as well as some old ones), get to do largely what I like and get appreciated.
My career has been largely unplanned, though research, which I wanted to do ever since the age of fifteen years, has always been my main driver. I have had the good fortune to have many people interested in me - I owe them a lot. I believe that mathematics, statistics, data processing, modelling, motivation and adaptability have served me well; while motivation and adaptability are my 'own', mathematics, statistics, data processing and modelling have come largely from my training in physics. A good foundation in physics and mathematics, coupled with passion, motivation and adaptability will take you a long way.
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