On November 12, 2025, alumnus of the department, Dr. Bharat Pant, met with undergraduate and graduate students in Allen Hall to discuss his diverse career in the industry spanning several decades.

About Dr. Pant

Bharat Pant is an artist and a physicist. He grew up in the foothills of the Himalaya in north India and painted outdoors from nature. Physics brought him to the University of Pittsburgh where he earned a Ph.D. in condensed matter theory in 1983.

After a stint as a postdoc at Washington University in theoretical chemistry, Bharat spent most of his remaining career in industry in the development of silicon-based sensors. Sensors are ubiquitous, and find applications in areas such as magnetic compassing, altitude detection, aircraft navigation, personal navigation, atmospheric sensing, etc. He retired from full-time work in 2024.

Bharat will briefly describe the trajectory of his industry career. This includes magnetic sensor design engineer, ultrasound transducer design engineer for noninvasive surgery, manager of reliability group for magnetic recording, manager of silicon sensor group responsible for gyro and accelerometer development for inertial navigation, and technology strategy manager.

He will discuss in some detail his work on the design of magnetoresistive sensors for magnetic fields in the earth’s field regime.

He will conclude by sharing some learnings from his career in industry that might be of use to someone at the start of their career.

As an artist, Bharat finds the intuitive, non-analytic, part of the brain to be a prime, but not exclusive, mover, in the making of his art. Though less explicit, the same intuitive part of the brain also plays a role in the development of technology.