Rate My Professor Ganpathy Murthy

Ganpathy Murthy is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Associate Chair in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Kentucky. He is also a member of the Center for Computational Sciences. Murthy earned his B.Tech. from IIT Madras in 1982 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1987. From 1990 to 1999, he served as a faculty member at Boston University before joining the University of Kentucky in 1999. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2009 and received the Outstanding Referee award from the APS in the same year.

Murthy's research focuses on condensed matter physics, with specializations in strongly correlated electron systems, the interplay of interactions and disorder, bilayer quantum Hall systems, states with strong correlations and quantum fluctuations in mesoscopic systems, and the effects of disorder on gauge theories. His seminal contributions include the Hamiltonian theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect, co-authored with R. Shankar in Reviews of Modern Physics 75, 1101 (2003). Other key publications feature 'A Composite Fermion Hofstadter Problem: Partially Polarized Density Wave States in the FQHE' in Physical Review Letters 84, 350 (2000); 'Hamiltonian Theory of the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect: Conserving Approximation for Incompressible Fractions' in Physical Review B 64, 195310 (2001); and 'Hamiltonian Theory of the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect: Effect of Landau Level Mixing' in Physical Review B 65, 245309 (2002). Recent works address fractional quantum Hall phases in graphene, such as 'Fractional quantum Hall coexistence phases in higher Landau levels of graphene' in Physical Review B 111, 045110 (2025), and topological semimetals. Murthy has presented public lectures on topics including 'Topological Insulators 101,' the 'History of the Universe from the Big Bang to Now,' and quantum Hall effects. He maintains over 160 publications in leading journals.