Wits mourns the passing of Professor Deepak Kar
- Wits University
Professor Kar passed away at 47 after a highly successful career as a physicist.
Wits University is saddened by the passing of Professor Deepak Kar, after a short illness on Monday, December 21.
Professor Kar was born in Maryland, United States of America on 13 June 1979 then spent his childhood in India. He moved back to America where he obtained his PhD in 2008 from the Department of Physics, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. Following his PhD, he held Postdoctoral Research Associate/Fellow positions at IKTP, TU Dresden, Germany (2009-2012) and the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom (2012-2015).
Professor Deepak Kar joined the School of Physics, University of the Witwatersrand in March 2015 as a Lecturer and was then promoted to Senior Lecturer in May 2016 and to Associate Professor in May 2019. In October 2025, he was promoted to Full Professor and delivered his inaugural lecture titled “Novel dark matter searches at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN” on 23 July 2025.
Professor Kar was an excellent Particle Physicist researcher with a NRF B2 rating of international standing. He has an impressive Google Scholar h-index of 225, with 1300 odd publications and several hundred thousand citations typical of collaborative research within the ATLAS experiment at CERN.
Professor Kar’s expertise and research interests spanned measurements sensitive to different aspects of quantum chromodynamics, Monte Carlo event generators, and searches for new physics in novel final states. He has established himself as a pioneer in designing and performing strongly interacting dark sector, a recently popular model of dark matter. He wrote a popular textbook on Experimental Particle Physics: Understanding the measurements and searches at the Large Hadron Collider which has been downloaded more than two thousand times: https://iopscience.iop.org/book/mono/978-0-7503-2112-9.
Professor Kar was very passionate about postgraduate training and supervised several MSc and PhD students to graduation including hosting several postdoctoral fellows. He was very proud of his postgraduate student’s achievements who have been awarded prestigious bursaries and were award winners at both international and national conferences. Recently, his MSc student was selected for the prestigious CERN summer programme, where only 200 students are selected from over 6000 applicants from all over the world.
Professor Kar was very successful in attracting research grants and awards. In 2024 he was awarded the prestigious Royal Society Wolfson Visiting Fellowship which he utilised during his very productive sabbatical leave at the University of Glasgow. He served on several committees nationally and internationally, most recently he served with great dedication on the Council of the South African Institute of Physics (2023-2025), including his contribution to the Standards and Awards portfolio. He was member of the Institute of Physics, a former member of the American Physical Society and an associate member of the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences, South Africa. He served as a reviewer for numerous journals, assessor of grant applications, examiner of Dissertations and Theses, evaluator of Postgraduate competitions, and participated in outreach and engagement activities. His commitment and service to the physics community are sincerely appreciated and will always be remembered.
Professor Kar was avid explorer of culture, cuisine, and historic sites. He travelled extensively visiting more than 130 countries worldwide, most recently Afghanistan. His life ambition was to conquer all parts of the globe; Libya was one of his last destinations where he contracted malaria before passing away in India.
“Professor Kar has been a valued member of our academic community, a dedicated teacher, and an outstanding scientist. His work, including his significant contributions through CERN, had a lasting impact on the School of Physics. A great loss to the particle physics community at a tender age of 47 years. We will always remember him for his cheerful spirit and collegial presence,” says Professor Deena Naidoo, Head of the School of Physics.
"I am deeply shocked by the untimely passing of Professor Kar. He was a larger-than-life character, filled with energy and enthusiasm about life's mysteries, whether this was through his research in experimental particle physics or his interests in AI or his very extensive travels around the world. He died doing what he loved most, which was to experience different cultures around the world. His contributions to physics were immense, and he will be sorely missed," says Professor Nithaya Chetty, Dean of the Faculty of Science.
Wits offers its sincere condolences to his family, friends, and his colleagues.