Deepak Kumar Karan, a very poor lad of Maniabandha village under Badamba block who hails from a poor labourer family, has bagged the rare International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy (IAGA) Young Scientist Award from the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics.
This year such award was given to four persons, two from Russia, one from the UK and Deepak Karan from India. He is the first Indian to bag such a prestigious award which was conferred to him at Montreal, Canada recently. To get this award, he was nominated by the International Symposium on Equatorial Aeronomy for his Best Young Scientist Paper Award in the 15th International Symposium on Equatorial Aeronomy held at the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad during October 2018.
At present Deepak is working as a Research Associate in the NASA's GOLD ( Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk) Mission to investigate Earth's upper atmosphere. Now he is working at "Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics ( LASP), University of Colorado, Boulder in USA.
Deepak has completed his PhD at Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad under the supervision of Professor Duggirala Pallamraju. The title of his thesis was "Investigation of Daytime Thermospheric Wave Dynamics over Low- latitudes Using Ground-Based Optical Techniques" which was declared as best thesis for the year 2017 by Gujarat Science Academy.
Deepak who was born in a poor labourer class family to father Nilamani and mother Susama, after his completion of matriculation even in first division, was not able to take admission in college due to poverty. However, a lecturer in Botany Pradip Kumar Sahoo of CS College of Science and Arts extended his helping hand to him and adopted him as a regular student in his college providing all sorts of study materials.
When he passed his Plus Two in first division, he studied Plus Three in Gopabandhu Science College of Athagarh with Physics Honours who scored top in Utkal University. He studied his PG in Ravenshaw University and completed MPhil from Sambalpur University with specialisation in Electronics.
