Punit Boolchand is a materials scientist, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computing Systems (EECS) in the College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS) at the University of Cincinnati (UC), where he is director of the Solid State Physics and Electronic Materials Laboratory[1] He discovered the Intermediate Phase: an elastically percolative network glass distinguished from traditional (clustered) liquid–gas spinodals by strong non-local long-range interactions.
The IP characterizes space-filling, nearly stress-free and non-aging, critically self-organized non-equilibrium glassy networks (such as window glass, ineluctably complex high-temperature superconductors, microelectronic Si/SiO2 high-k dielectric interfaces, and protein folding).
His experimental data over a 25-year period (1982–2007) formed the basis for the theory of network glasses developed by James Charles Phillips and Michael Thorpe.
Boolchand was born in 1944, in Varanasi, in Uttar Pradesh, in Northern India.
He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1995 for Mossbauer studies of chalcogenide glasses that elucidate coordination, cluster formation, and incipient phase separation.