Professor of Philosophy and Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. Originally from Darjeeling, India, he has been living mostly in the United States since 1977 when he became an undergraduate at Columbia, graduating in 1981 with majors in mathematics, philosophy, and physics. His last year at Columbia was spent as a graduate student in the Physics Department even though he was yet to earn a BA. After that he attended the University of Chicago and obtained a Master’s degree in the Conceptual Foundations of Science in 1984 and a PhD in Philosophy in 1989. His early work was in theoretical physics and computer science but he gravitated towards biology and its history and philosophy towards the end of his graduate education.
From 1988 till 1993 he worked at Boston University as Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Boston Theoretical Biology Group. During that period he began a long-term collaboration with John Stachel. In 1992 he was a Senior Fellow at the Edelstein Centre for the Philosophy of Science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1993 -94 he was a Fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science at MIT and simultaneously a Research Scholar in Dick Lewontin’s laboratory at Harvard. From 1994 to 1998 he taught at McGill University while spending 1996 -1997 as Fellow at the Wissehschaftskolleg zu Berlin. While there he began a collaboration with Chris Margules on systematic conservation planning for the protection of biodiversity. He was Visiting Scholar at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin during 1997 -1998 and again in 2002 -2003 and 2014. Since 1998 he has taught at the University of Texas at Austin. Until 2003 he was Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science. Since then he have been Professor of Philosophy and of Integrative Biology. His primary interests today are in the philosophy and history of biology and formal epistemology. However, he continue to work in conservation science and in disease ecology and epidemiology with extensive collaboration with Victor Sànchez-Cordero of UNAM in Mèxico City. A major focus of interest is the design of a conservation area network in Mèxico to maintain the migration of the eastern population of North American Monarch butterflies. He also collaborates with Lauren Gardner of Johns Hopkins University on problems of epidemiology and public health. Prospective graduate students can explore the Philosophy Department’s graduate program.
Sarkar has also worked as an environmental consultant (and continues to do so to a limited extent), professional photographer, and (many decades ago) as a blues musician. The African Activist Archive at Michigan State University contains some of his materials related to his involvement in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s.