Chandra Wickramasinghe - Scientific Career

Scientific Career

In 1960 he commenced work in Cambridge on his PhD degree under the supervision of the late Sir Fred Hoyle, and published his first scientific paper "On Graphite Particles as Interstellar Grains” in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1962. He was awarded a PhD degree in Mathematics in 1963 and was elected a Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge in the same year. In the following year he was appointed a Staff Member of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. Here he continued to work on the nature of Interstellar Dust, publishing many papers in this field that led to a shift of emphasis in astronomy from inorganic dust models to organic grains.

He published the first definitive book on Interstellar Grains in 1967. He has made many important contributions to this field, publishing over 350 papers in peer-reviewed journals, over 75 in Nature (journal). In 1974 he first proposed the hypothesis that some dust in interstellar space was largely organic (contain carbon), a theory that now has widespread support.

Chandra Wickramasinghe had the longest running collaboration with the late Sir Fred Hoyle, and is responsible for forging a link between biology and astronomy in the late 1970s. Their publications (many books and papers) arguing for panspermia and a cosmic hypothesis of life are controversial.

Wickramasinghe was appointed a UNDP Consultant and Advisor to the President of Sri Lanka in 1982-84, and played a key role in the setting up of the Institute of Fundamental Studies in Sri Lanka. In 1983/84 he was appointed the founder and Director of the Institute of Fundamental Studies by President Junius Jayawardene.