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Dr. Atanu Nath is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Tihu College, Tihu, in the Nalbari district of Assam. Nath is originally from Lalabazar in the Hailakandi district and has made Northeast India proud by being one of the winners of the 2026 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics—often dubbed the "Oscars of science."

In 2016, Nat was awarded a PhD in theoretical particle physics from the University of Naples “Federico II” in Italy. He then went on to work as a postdoctoral fellow and the run coordinator for the Muon g-2 experiment (E989) at Fermilab, USA, and has been a part of the Indian Institutions-Fermilab Collaboration and research at IIT Guwahati.

Nath has been awarded the Breakthrough Prize this year for his work on the Muon g-2 experiment, which is studying the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon to search for new physics beyond the Standard Model. He's sharing the prize with 376 scientists around the world, including about 11 from India, and is the first in this category from the Northeast.