Asoke N. Mitra is an editorial fellow at PHISPC. He received his early education in mathematics at Ramjas College, the University of Delhi, under his father, Professor Jatindranath Mitra. His subsequent training in physics was at the University of Delhi under Professor R. C. Majumdar, ending at Cornell University under Freeman Dyson and Hans Bethe. Mitra's professional career spans about 40 years, starting as a reader in physics at Aligarh Muslim University in 1955 and ending as INSA–Einstein Research Professor at the University of Delhi till 1994. In between, he held visiting assignments at Indiana University, University of Illinois–Chicago, to name a few. He has also been a member of several professional bodies, national and international. He is a fellow of the three Indian science academies, the American Physics Society, and the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), Trieste. His principal contributions are the exact solution of the nuclear three-body problem with separable potentials, which offered a new insight into the structure of the three body wave function, leading to ‘few-nucleon studies' as a new branch of physics; a node in the proton e.m. form factor, unless fermion quarks have an extra d.o.f.—a forerunner for the discovery of ‘colour'; the ‘quark-recoil effect' (in association with Marc Ross), for the understanding of enhanced heavy meson modes of decay. Over the years, he has developed a comprehensive dynamical framework leading to an integrated view of the dynamics of two- and three-body systems at successively deeper levels of compositeness from nuclear to sub-hadronic. He has published more than 200 research papers and reviews, and edited five books, including Quantum Field Theory (2000). His awards include the S. S. Bhatnagar (CSIR) and Meghnad Saha (UGC) prizes, the S. K. Mitra Medal (ISCA), and the INSA–Einstein professorship. Since 1996, he has been a freelance writer-researcher.