Jainendra K. Jain, an Indian physicist, completed his undergraduate study at the Maharaja College, Jaipur, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (class of 1981). He is an alumnus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1985 with Philip B. Allen. From 1989 to 1998 he was a professor at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and thereafter joined the Pennsylvania State University as the Erwin W. Mueller Professor of Physics.
Jain is a condensed matter theorist with interests in the area of strongly interacting electronic systems in low dimensions. As the discoverer of the exotic particles called composite fermions, he developed the composite fermion theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect and unified the fractional and the integral quantum Hall effects. His writings include a monograph Composite Fermions, published by Cambridge University Press, 2007.
He was a co-recipient of the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society in 2002. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.