The AONSA Prize 2013
The Selection Committee (SC) for the AONSA Prize 2013 received multiple nominations
before the deadline (July 31, 2012) and spent a few months seriously reviewing them.

All

the nominees were highly qualified, reflecting the quality of neutron scattering research in our
Asia-Oceania Region. The SC eventually selected Prof. Balebail Anantha Dasannacharya fornomination to the Executive Committee of AONSA, which met in Beijing, China on October 27,
2012 and officially approved the SC’s nomination.

Prof. Dasannacharya will be awarded acertificate, a monetary prize ($5,000) and a plaque at the Prize Ceremony to be held on July 12,2013 during the ICNS 2013 at Edinburgh, UK where his Prize Lecture is also planned.
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Balebail Anantha Dasannacharya

Retired from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, India
Citation: “For his pioneering contributions to neutron scattering in the Asia-Oceania region,
through his early development of neutron spectroscopy and its applications for the dynamics in
low-temperature liquids and molecular solids, and his active promotion of regional andinternational science as well as the national user program in India.”
Balebail Anantha Dasannacharya received his B.Sc. degree in physics from Banaras Hindu
University in 1957 and was awarded the Devasthale Prize. His career in neutron scattering
began in 1958 upon joining BARC as a Scientific Officer, where he participated in design,
installation and use of the first automatic neutron diffractometer and inelastic spectrometer inIndia. He received his M.Sc. degree by research from Bombay University in 1961, and wasselected as a Colombo Plan fellow on “Neutron Scattering with B. N. Brockhouse in Atomic
Energy Canada Ltd.”, where he performed detailed constant-Q measurement on the canonicalliquid argon with Dr. Brockhouse. He received his Ph.D. degree by research from Bombay
University in 1969, and continued as Scientific Officer at BARC.

As early as 1966, he was appointed as IAEA expert at Philippines Atomic Energy Commission
under Regional Collaboration Agreement, where he trained scientists from Philippines, Thailandand Korea many of whom are now core members of neutron scattering facilities in theirrespective countries. As Director of Solid State & Spectroscopy Group & MultidisciplinaryTechnology Group, BARC, and later on as Director of Inter University Consortium for
Department of Atomic Energy Facilities, he was instrumental in making Dhruva reactor
facilities open to university scientists in India. He played a major role in supplying neutron
spectrometers to South Korea, Indonesia and Bangladesh in the early stage, which implanted
seeds of neutron beam research in the regions.
He has successfully demonstrated how original research can be done using medium flux
reactors in the Asian-Oceania region. He was the first to map out entire quasielastic and inelastic
spectra of CD in an integrated fashion, by bringing together the complimentary neutron andoptical spectroscopy techniques. Employing Filter Detector technique for fairly large energy
transfer and the polarization dependency of incoherent scattering, he had the first time in BARC
characterized different librational modes of water in hydrates. Incorporation of a ΔT analyzer tothe window-filter concept, he drastically improved the energy resolution that led to theconstruction of the collaborative instrument IRIS on spallation source at ISIS. This resulted in theopening up of the neutron scattering channel for Indian scientists at ISIS.
He was awarded the prestigious Homi Bhabha Medal of Indian National Science Academy andMahendra Lal Sircar Award of Indian Association of Cultivation of Science for his contributions
to neutron scattering. He is a Fellow of Indian National Science Academy, a Fellow of Indian
Academy of Science, and a past-President of Indian Physics Association. He served in various
Scientific Councils including BARC and ISIS. Most importantly, he implanted seeds of neutron
beam research in Asia-Oceania region at the times when conditions were not conducive for thepurpose.