Bedangadas Mohanty is Senior Professor of Physics at the School of Physical Sciences, NISER, Bhubaneswar, and Deputy Spokesperson of the ALICE experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. He earlier served as Deputy Spokesperson of the STAR experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA. After a gold-medal Master’s from Utkal University (1996) and a Ph.D. from the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar (2002), he pursued postdoctoral research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was a scientist at VECC, Kolkata (2002–2012). Dr Mohanty is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and all three Indian science academies, and recipient of India’s top honors including the Infosys Prize (2021), Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (2015), and Swarna Jayanti Fellowship (2010). He has over 800 publications with 96,000+ citations (h-index 154) and has guided 20 Ph.D. students. His research focuses on the QCD phase diagram, the quark–gluon plasma, and searches for rare events like dark matter, fractionally charged particles and coherent neutrino-nucleus elastic scattering.