In 2024, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the United States' oldest and most prestigious scholarly societies.
He joined the faculty of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai in 1982 and worked there till 2015.
He also contributed significantly to the building of the Department of Theoretical Physics of TIFR, especially the string theory group.
He is the Chair of the Advisory Committee of the Bengaluru Science and Technology Cluster set up by the Govt of India, where science institutions, government labs and private industry meet to provide solution to some socially relevant problems like OneHealth, climate change and nationally aspirational projects like the design and manufacture of a turbofan jet engine in India.
Spenta Wadia has made significant contributions to high energy physics and quantum gravity, that include i) the observation that global gauges like the Coulomb gauge cannot be fixed in a non-abelian gauge theory; ii) the discovery of the large N, 3rd order phase transition in soluble models of low dim lattice gauge theory[2] (called the Gross-Witten-Wadia transition); iii) for the exact closed equations for Wilson loops in a lattice gauge theory; iv) for the first proposal of a Nambu-Jona-Lasinio type phenomenological non-linear fermion model for QCD that describes all low energy properties of low-lying mesons, including their anomalous interactions; v) for the discovery of the black hole solution of 2-dim string theory; vi) for the exact bosonization of non-relativistic fermions using the co-adjoint orbits of the W(infinity) algebra; vii) for extending the D-brane model of Strominger and Vafa to near extremal black holes that emit Hawking radiation and demonstrating the rate calculated in this model matched Hawking’s calculation in gravity; vii) for dualities involving the partition function and S-matrix of fermions and bosons coupled to 2+1 dim Chern-Simons theories; viii) for the first detailed study of black hole formation and evaporation within the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model that is a holographic description of black holes in 2-dim gravity, that effectively describes 4-dim near extremal black holes.