Interim President (2018)
Born in Kolkata, India, and raised in western Massachusetts, Protik (Tiku) Majumder, Barclay Jermain Professor of Natural Philosophy, was appointed interim president of the college by the Williams Trustees following the departure of Adam Falk in December 2017. Majumder continued in that role until the arrival of Maud S. Mandel in July 2018.
Interim President Majumder earned his B.S. from Yale in 1982 and his Ph.D. in atomic physics from Harvard in 1989. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington, where he pursued experimental tests of fundamental physics with atoms, he joined the Williams faculty in 1994. At Williams he has taught a wide variety of courses, from upper-level physics tutorials to introductory courses for non-scientists. He has supervised more than 60 Williams undergraduates, including 30 senior honors thesis students, in his experimental physics laboratory. Two have won the American Physical Society’s prestigious Apker Award, another was a finalist, and more than 20 have been co-authors on journal publications.
President Majumder was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2007. His research in high-precision laser spectroscopy of atoms has been funded by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the National Institute of Standards and Technology Precision Measurement Grants program, and, for the past two decades, by the National Science Foundation. In 2017 he was awarded the APS’s Prize for a Faculty Member for Research at an Undergraduate Institution.
As a member of the Williams faculty, President Majumder has served as chair of the Physics department (2003–2005), chair of the Faculty Steering Committee (2007–2009), member of the Presidential Search Committee (2010), and, since 2010, as director of the Science Center, helping to oversee the design and construction of two new science buildings.