Homi J. Bhabha

Homi Jehangir Bhabha loved painting, listening to Western classical music, and thinking about the tiny particles that make up the whole universe. He believed that a new country like India needed to understand atoms, not to make bombs but to make electricity, fight disease, and grow better crops.

He founded India's very first atomic research centre near Mumbai and helped his country take its first careful steps into the nuclear age.

Homi Jehangir Bhabha was born in 1909 in Mumbai into a wealthy Parsi family. He studied engineering and then physics at Cambridge, where he did important work on cosmic rays and quantum theory.

He returned to India in 1939 and, with support from the Tata family, founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in 1945.

In 1948 he set up the Atomic Energy Commission of India and later the Atomic Energy Establishment at Trombay near Bombay (today's Bhabha Atomic Research Centre). He argued that nuclear energy could give India cheap, plentiful electricity, and he laid out a three-stage plan for nuclear power that Indian scientists still follow.

He believed strongly in the peaceful use of atomic energy. He died in the crash of Air India Flight 101 on Mont Blanc in January 1966.

He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1954 and remains the father figure of India's nuclear science.