[6] After completing his schooling from Sailendra Sircar Vidyalaya in Kolkata, he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1975 from the Presidency College under the University of Calcutta, and his master's a year later from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Ashoke Sen made a number of major original contributions to the subject of string theory, including his landmark paper on strong-weak coupling duality or S-duality,[7] which was influential in changing the course of research in the field.

He pioneered the study of unstable D-branes and made the famous Sen conjecture about open string tachyon condensation on such branes.

His recent important works include the attractor mechanism and the precision counting of microstates of black holes, and new developments in string perturbation theory.

His specific research interests include S-duality, tachyon condensation, black hole entropy and superstring perturbation theory.